Tasks + Dataview (plugins) and recurring tasks

I am a long-time orgmode user who is getting tired of Emacs (or, more specifically, Elisp) and landed on Obsidian a few days ago as a very promising potential alternative. Aside from a few quibbles, it looks great for knowledge management, but it is less clear that I can use it for task management. For me, the two are pretty inextricably linked and I’m not really interested in an “X for knowledge management, Y for task management” solution – I would rather stick with orgmode than do that. But I really, really want to be free of Emacs.

It seems that I can accomplish most of what I want in terms of task management through the combination of the Tasks and Dataview plugins – in theory, at least. Where it seems to fall short for me is with recurring tasks. They are easy enough to set up via Tasks, and when I use a “tasks” code block in preview mode and mark a recurring task as done, the next instance of the task is auto-scheduled as expected. But when I view the same task via a “dataview” query and mark it done, the recurrence is not respected.

So far I have not found a way to view my tasks as I would like using the Tasks plugin alone, but Dataview does the job really well. Has anybody else solved this?

Also – and this only just occurred to me as I was writing – is it possible to combine queries from the two plugins? I don’t see an obvious way to do that, but I’ve only been using Obsidian for 36 hours…

Things I have tried

As a simple test, I created a folder called “TODO” and put several files in it that contain tasks. In my root folder, I created two new files to collect my tasks. The first, “Tasks (using Tasks)”:

```tasks
```

In preview mode, it shows a list of tasks from all the files in “TODO” with due dates, recurrence, and a link in parentheses after this task that includes the filename and the header above the task (e.g., file > header).

The second, “Tasks (using Dataview)”:

```dataview
task from "TODO"
```

In preview mode, it shows my tasks grouped under headings that correspond to the filenames in the “TODO” folder.

What I’m trying to do

At this stage, I would like to have the view that I get when I preview “Tasks (using Dataview)”, but when I mark a recurring task as done, I would like the next instance to be automatically scheduled like it is when I preview “Tasks (using Tasks)” and mark it done.

2 Likes

dataview appears to filter based on YAML property values on a per-file basis. That is, each file would be a TODO with YAML properties, such as due date, start date and so on.

In contrast, tasks appears to find TODO items (- [ ]) within and across all files. This is more like org-agenda in that TODO items can be embedded within files.

I am not sure how one would use both dataview and tasks simultaneously.

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