Task Wheel plugin - see every open task once, on purpose - feedback welcome!

[MaxOnAMission]

Disclaimer

Is this plugin open source? Yes
Is this plugin completely free? Yes
Is this plugin vibe-coded beyond the author’s ability to comprehend how it works? No
Community Directory: [Task Wheel](https://community.obsidian.md/plugins/task-wheel)

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Task Wheel - see every open task once, on purpose - feedback welcome!

Your task list has outgrown you. This gives it a shape that has an end.

You know the feeling: you open the list for your weekly review, you scroll, you lose your place, and somewhere around the third screen reviewing quietly turns into skimming. And skimming is how things slip. The problem is not that you lack a task manager … you probably have one or more of those. The problem is that a list of five thousand items has no end you can reach, so “I have been through everything” is a feeling rather than a fact.

Task Wheel gives your open tasks a shape that does have an end: one visual overview of everything still open, drawn as a circle. Every task is a stop on a wheel you turn. The angle is the part of your life it belongs to; the distance from the centre is how deep it sits in your notes. You turn, each task comes past a fixed reading wedge at the top, and the circle closes. Made for weekly review, or any moment you need certainty rather than speed.

The wheel over a whole vault. Domains are wedges, tasks are stops, and the reading wedge sits at the top to indicate the active task. The card at the bottom displays the full task and options to mark it as done, cancel it, postpone, move it etc.

Try it in 60 seconds — free, everything local

1. Install & enable: Community plugins → search for Task Wheel.
2. Open it: the ribbon icon, or the command Open the wheel. Your top-level folders become the wedges; no setup, no format to learn.
3. Turn it. Drag, scroll, or ← →. Each stop is one task, on the card in front of you. When the circle closes, you are done, and you know it.

No account, no API key, nothing ever leaves your machine.

Why a circle, and not a better list

Two properties make the round mean something, and both are enforced rather than hoped for:

• Position is stable. Every domain gets a fixed slice that does not move with the number of tasks in it. Work grows into its own wedge; empty space is allowed to stay empty. That is what lets spatial memory build up - the client work lives at two o’clock - which is half the value of the idea.
• Nothing disappears silently. A folded branch stays as a stump with a counter. When a filter is on, the wheel says so, and says how much it is leaving out. The wheel may show you less than everything; it may never be quiet about it.

What you get

• It reads the checkboxes you already have. Plain Obsidian Tasks syntax: dates, priorities, recurrence, tags. No format of its own. The Tasks plugin is not required, but when it is installed, ticking off goes through it, so recurring tasks roll over exactly as Tasks would do it.
• A reading card at every stop: where the task sits, what it says, its dates and priority, and the review actions: tick off, mark in progress, cancel, push a week out, raise or lower priority, open the note. The two status buttons are toggles, so a mis-tap on a phone has a way back.
• The same drawing at any size. Two hundred tasks and twenty thousand produce the same amount of drawing: what is under the reading wedge swells and shows its deeper rings, the far side recedes to a silhouette, and the rest folds into stumps that carry counters. Turn towards a stump and it opens.
• A filter that admits what it hides: by words, status, date, priority or tag, in its own panel, with a badge that says how much sits outside the round even when the panel is closed. Changing the filter starts a new round, because a round is a round of that selection.
• A wheel over one folder or one note. Right-click it in the file list (long-press on a phone). Inside a folder the subfolders become the wedges; inside a note its headings do — the wheel is that note’s outline, empty headings included, so “phase 3 has nothing in it” is something you can see rather than something that is simply missing.
• Structure editing where it belongs. In a note’s own wheel you can move a task among its siblings, send it to another heading (typing a name that does not exist offers to make it), add one, or rename it. Prose stays in the note; the wheel does structure.
• Carrying work into another note: copy or move a task, or a whole heading with everything under it, into another note, and the category travels with it: a task under Werk › Klanten lands under Werk › Klanten over there, writing whatever part of that path is missing.
• Not every checkbox is a task. A list of acceptance criteria in a template is a document’s checklist, not work on your plate. Tell the wheel once: by note type in the front matter, or by heading name, both with * patterns. There is also a command that shows you exactly what those rules take out, so a silent rule is still a debuggable one.
• Thirteen languages in the help panel, following Obsidian’s own language setting.

What Task Wheel is not

A review instrument first, not a task manager. The point is being able to say with certainty that you have seen everything; ticking a task off is possible, but it is not what the wheel is for. So, deliberately: no external task services, no task syntax of its own, no time blocking or calendar, no multi-user collaboration, and no full task editor. Splitting a task or rewriting it belongs in the note which is what open the note is for.

Privacy

Nothing leaves your machine. The wheel reads your vault through Obsidian’s own APIs and writes back to your notes when you ask it to: no network calls, no telemetry, no account. Desktop and mobile. Every release asset carries a build-provenance attestation proving it was built from the published source.

Feedback welcome!

In the last couple of weeks I’ve been developing and refining the current version and I think it is ready for review by others. So … I’d love to hear how it works for you, especially:

• Does the angle = domain, radius = depth grammar match how your vault is actually organised? Folder, tag namespace and front-matter property are all offered as the source of the angle. Is one of those missing for you?
• After a full round, do you believe you saw everything? That is the one claim the whole thing rests on. How does zooming in and out work and clicking through on a domain?
• Is the wheel readable on your phone, and does turning feel right there?
• Where does it get in your way: too many stops, too few, a wedge that is too small to use?
• Any bugs or rough edges you run into?

Feel free to open issues on GitHub or reply here. Task Wheel is free and GPL-3.0; if it changed how you review your work, you can buy me a coffee.

[patbem]

I had about 2300 open Tasks in my Vault. I only used your plugin in a fairly basic way on a computer.

Besides the rough edges mentioned below, i think it is an awesome idea. It feels less overwhelming and more enjoyable to me than just putting all tasks in a dataview-callout or scroll through kanban-boards.

In the two hours i tried it, i reduced the number of tasks to about 1750. Probably tells a lot about the state my vault. Anyway I think i would not have cared to look for these tasks, were it not for this plugin. It also helped me to identify some structural issues with the vault. So it’s definitely a plugin i enjoy using for this fairly specific purpose. And i’ll use it some more!

Thank you

I struggled navigating a little bit. But it helped to pick folders or files so there were less than <=300 Tasks.

Assume i am very deep in a task-tree. On compact or balanced, the adjacent files have a wobbly dot, indicating that they have sub-tasks that might be on the same layer i am currently in. At least as far as i understood it. But i can’t navigate there with the arrow keys. They loop within the file i am currently in. I’d expect the adjacent file to unfold and move to it. But instead i have to move closer to the core, move to the next file and than upwards. Often enough i moved in further than intended an completely lost track of what i was doing. But might be just me

The help-mouse-over popped up again and again. After reading it twice I don’t feel like it offers anything anymore. So i’d like to turn it off.

I tend to have fairly long tasks. So i preferred a way to show more of the text. I often found myself editing the Task or opening the file to search for it. That makes it takes more time than necessary to decide if a task has any relevance. So a mouse-over that shows the whole text, more text on the bottom square or above the dot would be nice.

Deleting a task would be nice as well. Apparently I have random empty checkboxes in my vault I usually don’t cancel tasks, but remove them entirely instead.

[MaxOnAMission]

Hi and thanks first of all!

Very thorough feedback and I will go into each point - please do let me know if I missed the point on any item.

First off, from 2300 down to 1750 in two hours. That sounds exactly like what I had in mind when I started building this plugin. For me the weel gives me more of a visual cue as to where the work sits and whether it makes sense or not. A list could never do that for me. I’m glad it also surfaced other structural issues in your vault. I noticed the same thing in mine.

Two of your rough edges are straightforward bugs

The arrows loop inside the file you’re in. Good spot, including the fix. Why this happens: the branch under the reading wedge is allowed two rings more than the rest of the wheel. This means that when you are deep in a tree, the neighbouring branches might have nothing drawn at that depth. Any move left and right only look at what is drawn so they find no neighbour and wrap. The move then becomes unpredictable. Getting lost by moving further in than you meant is the exact failure the wheel is supposed to prevent. It should step into the next branch at that depth and let it unfold, which is what you expected. I’m looking into this one.

The help text that keeps popping up. That is not a help tooltip. It is the screen-reader description of the wheel, and Obsidian renders any such description as a hover tooltip. The element sits on the whole canvas, so you get a paragraph every time your mouse rests. It should never have been visible to a mouse at all. Rather than a switch to turn it off, I’ll make it invisible to hovering and still available to a screen reader, which is what it was for.

Then I read two more functional gaps rather than bugs:

Long tasks. The card clamps the title to two lines on purpose — the card holds a fixed frame so the wheel that is drawn underneath never jumps while you turn. But you found the workaround that gives the game away: opening the rename editor to read the whole thing. That’s a hint that the tool is missing. The card will get a way to expand a clipped title on demand, as an overlay so the wheel underneath still stays put.

Deleting. This is a deliberate ommission. The main reasoning is that cancelling ([-]) already says “not doing this” and can be undone. That holds for a real task but I agree that it doesn’t make sense for all tasks/ empty tasks. I had empty tasks too and used another plugin which could do find and replace across a vault to get rid of those. I’d like to stay conservative here and propose to only look at removing a line when it is truly empty. I will not want to build functionality that accidentally destroys a tree with real work in it etc. I will test first and will keep it deliberately narrow: a task with nothing under it, with the line shown before it goes etc. This one might take a while before I feel comfortable

One thing you found out on your own that is worth mentioning for others too: opening a wheel over a folder or a single note (right-click it in the file list) is the intended move for a big vault, not a workaround. Same for double clicking on a domain node to allow you to focus the wheel only on that selection.

So my assoumption for now: I suspect a good part of “I struggled navigating” was the arrow behaviour, I’ll look at that first.

Thanks again and I’ll be back

[MaxOnAMission]

Hi, back with an update

Just released a new version 0.1.12 and I think you’ll see your feedbackalmost entirely included. Thank you! — this was really useful feedback!

1. The arrows. You had the diagnosis right, and it turned out to go one layer deeper than either of us thought. Left and right walked the ring as drawn, and the branch under the reading wedge is drawn deeper than the rest — so on those rings there was nothing on screen to step to. That had been fixed: it now walks the whole ring: the next item on it, drawn or not, and the wheel opens around it if it was not. Two things follow, and they are the point: a sideways step never changes which ring you are on, and the opposite key always brings you back where you came from.
2. Underneath that sat a bigger one: in some cases the wheel could not draw the item it was focused on — the rings had run out on a branch, or you had folded it away — and it failed silently, which is exactly the bounce you were seeing. The way down to whatever you are reading is now drawn open regardless. A folded branch you look inside closes again when you leave.
3. And there is now also a setting for what a sideways step does: it visits every task (the default — no branch is a dead end) or along the ring (the same depth across branches, for comparing two projects at one level). The other one is always on Shift + ← →.
4. The help text that kept popping up. Gone. It was the screen-reader description of the wheel, and Obsidian renders any such description as a hover tooltip over the whole canvas. It is now invisible to a mouse and unchanged for a screen reader, so there is nothing left to switch off. The check I added to stop that happening again found a second one in the filter panel’s search box on the spot.
5. Long tasks. A clipped title now offers Show the whole task, which lays the full text over the card without moving the wheel underneath. The rename box got the same room.

Not done - deliberately

• Deleting is the one I have not built. I want to be comfortable with it before it ships: one task line with nothing under it, with the line shown before it goes. It is on the list rather than in this release.

If you get a chance to put 0.1.12 through the same two hours, I would like to know whether navigating that vault feels different now.

[MaxOnAMission]

Will release 0.1.13 shortly - a minor css error fixed

[MaxOnAMission]

Update — the wheel now has a keyboard and closer Tasks integration

Since this thread started, most of the work went into one thing: turning the wheel without a mouse. Almost all of it came out of reports here and from my own weekly reviews, so - this is what your feedback turned into. we’re on version Task-Wheel version 0.1.19 now.

• Moving around no longer traps you. Left and right used to walk the ring as drawn, and the wheel draws the branch you are reading deeper than the rest meaning that on those rings there was often no neighbour to step to and the key quietly did nothing. Sideways now walks the whole ring: the next item on it, drawn or not, and the wheel opens around it if it was not. A step sideways never changes which ring you are on, and the opposite key always brings you back.
• The keys work the moment a wheel opens. It used to look ready to start navigating but wasn’t. A task on the reading wedge, a card beside it, and nothing listening until you clicked the drawing. That’s fixed now - the focus goes straight to the wheel.
• Enter steps in, backspace steps back out. Enter opens what the item is: a wheel over a folder, a note or a heading — or, for a task, the task itself for editing. Backspace walks back up the ladder and keeps you on the item you were reading, now seen from further out. Ctrl/Cmd with Enter opens the note it is written in. - in my case only Ctrl/Cmd + Shift +Enter works. Let me know what you’re seeing!
• It meets you where you are. Put your cursor on a task in a note, open the wheel, and it opens on that task.

Cool integration:

• If you use the Tasks plugin, the ⋯ menu offers Edit in Tasks… opens the Tasks modal to edit the task, dates and recurrence and dependencies and all, writing back what you confirm without leaving the round. A setting can put it on the quicker gesture too. On desktop enter on a task will open the Tasks editor.
• No Tasks plugin? No problem - although you should really consider installing it! (Shoutout to @ClareMacrae and the others for this wonderful plugin ) Without Tasks the entry is simply not there and nothing else changes. I wanted to integrate with this plugin because it has a great modal for editing tasks - no desire whatsoever to build a completely new version within task wheel.

Minor usability improvements:

• A step now lands once. It used to mark every stop the turn passed and then move again when the drawing re-opened around where you landed, which felt as a scramble for what was actually only one step.
• On a phone, the wheel gets the screen back when the keyboard is up, and a task too long for the card can be read in full.

Other than that: Task-Wheel hasn’t changed it’s essential purpose: it reads the plain checkboxes you already have, nothing leaves your machine, and the point is being able to say with certainty that you saw everything, not ticking things off here.

Thanks to @patbem and others who shared their experiences and questions!