My adventures in using Taskwarrior
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Last edited: $Date: 2018/05/19 09:44:46 $
## Taskwarrior
Taskwarrior is an open source text-mode todo list tool on steroids.
It is loaded with features, so if you are good at procrastination,
you will become even be better at it, fiddling with all the
Taskwarrior options :)
To use Taskwarrior as a production tool, you need two components,
the desktop application and the server application.
The desktop application can be used as a stand alone tool, but than
you have to take care of the backups manually, which is a recipe for
disaster, and this also means your task list is bound to a single
system.
The server application is nothing more than a sync-tool. The desktop
application syncs with the server application. This way you can
share the same task list on multiple systems and you always have an
up to date copy of your task list on each of the systems as well as
on the server.
Your data is protected during transport by TLS, using strong
authentication with 4kb certificates on both the server and the
client.
Takswarrior features the usage of hooks, so e.g., for automagic
committing changes in the tasks file to RCS, Git, or any other
version control system.
## Decentralisation
There are many online task management solutions, and a lot of people
are using the solutions that comes with their cloud email and
calender suite. That may seem like a nice solution, not having to
worry about maintaining a system, doing backups, etc., but on the
long run this will result in vendor lock in and too much power in
just a few hands.
History have shown that when a provider of an infrastructure gets
too much power, e.g., because of massive user adoption, this almost
always leads to abuse of this power. In the internet era this
becomes a significant risk, because of the global reach of internet
solutions and the lack of global legal regulations to hold the
provider responsible for his actions.
Because of this, centralised solutions are to be avoided and small
scale systems, under control of the user, are preferred.
## Taskwarrior on OpenBSD
Installing Taskwarrior on OpenBSD is very simple, just use pkg_add,
both for the desktop application as well as for the server
application.
After installing taskd --the server application-- read the file in
/usr/local/share/doc/pkg-readmes/ which gives a nice step by step
manual on how to create the certificates for the server and for each
user.
Just following the steps in this manual takes only a few minutes and
results in a working synchronisation.
## My personal usage
I have recently started using Taskwarrior and use Taskwarrior for
both keeping track of my todo items as well as for keeping track of
items I have to discuss. In my day to day work, I have several
one-on-one meetings with co-workers, spread throughout the month.
Whenever an item pops up, that I want to discuss with one of my
co-workers, I add it as a task in Taskwarrior. For this I use a
special project "meeting". Within this project, for every co-worker
there is an individual subproject.
So let's assume I have some items to discuss with Alice, and some
items to discuss with Bob. In Taskwarrior there are two projects for
this:
- project:meeting.alice
- project:meeting.bob
Items added to these projects are seen by Taskwarrior as tasks, and
because they are connected to a project, Taskwarrior automaticly
assigns a higher priority to them. So when I request my normal todo
list, I don't want to see these items in the top part of my list,
and to prevent them from cluttering the todo list, I have made an
alias to filter them out:
task config alias.zzz list pro.not:meeting
Now, when I enter "task zzz", the task-list is shown, without the
meeting entries.
