Getting Started with Taskwarrior

Taskwarrior is a flexible command-line task management program. In their own words:

Taskwarrior manages your TODO list from your command line. It is flexible, fast, efficient, unobtrusive, does its job then gets out of your way.

Taskwarrior is highly customizable, but can also be used “right out of the box.” In this article, we’ll show you the basic commands to add and complete tasks. Then we’ll cover a couple more advanced commands. And finally, we’ll show you some basic configuration settings to begin customizing your setup.

Installing Taskwarrior

Taskwarrior is available in the Fedora repositories, so installing it is simple:

sudo dnf install task

Once installed, run task. This first run will create a ~/.taskrc file for you.

$ task
A configuration file could not be found in ~

Would you like a sample /home/link/.taskrc created, so Taskwarrior can proceed? (yes/no) yes
[task next]
No matches.

Adding Tasks

Adding tasks is fast and unobtrusive.

$ task add Plant the wheat
Created task 1.

Run task or task list to show upcoming tasks.

$ task list

ID Age Description         Urg 
 1 8s  Plant the wheat        0

1 task

Let’s add a few more tasks to round out the example.

$ task add Tend the wheat
Created task 2.
$ task add Cut the wheat
Created task 3.
$ task add Take the wheat to the mill to be ground into flour
Created task 4.
$ task add Bake a cake
Created task 5.

Run task again to view the list.

[task next]

ID Age  Description                                        Urg 
 1 3min Plant the wheat                                       0
 2 22s  Tend the wheat                                        0
 3 16s  Cut the wheat                                         0
 4 8s   Take the wheat to the mill to be ground into flour    0
 5 2s   Bake a cake                                           0

5 tasks

Completing Tasks

To mark a task as complete, look up its ID and run:

$ task 1 done
Completed task 1 'Plant the wheat'.
Completed 1 task.

You can also mark a task done with its description.

$ task 'Tend the wheat' done
Completed task 1 'Tend the wheat'.
Completed 1 task.

With add, list and done, you’re all ready to get started with Taskwarrior.

Setting Due Dates

Many tasks do not require a due date:

task add Finish the article on Taskwarrior

But sometimes, setting a due date is just the kind of motivation you need to get productive. Use the due modifier when adding a task to set a specific due date.

task add Finish the article on Taskwarrior due:tomorrow

due is highly flexible. It accepts specific dates (“2017-02-02”), or ISO-8601 (“2017-02-02T20:53:00Z”), or even relative time (“8hrs”). See the Date & Time documentation for all the examples.

Dates go beyond due dates too. Taskwarrior has scheduled, wait, and until.

task add Proof the article on Taskwarrior scheduled:thurs

Once the date (Thursday in this example) passes, the task is tagged with the READY virtual tag. It will then show up in the ready report.

$ task ready

ID Age   S  Description                                        Urg 
 1 2s    1d Proof the article on Taskwarrior                      5

To remove a date, modify the task with a blank value:

$ task 1 modify scheduled:

Searching Tasks

No task list is complete without the ability to search with regular expressions, right?

$ task '/.* the wheat/' list

ID Age   Project Description                                            Urg 
 2 42min         Take the wheat to the mill to be ground into flour        0
 1 42min Home    Cut the wheat                                             1

2 tasks

Customizing Taskwarrior

Remember that file we created back in the beginning (~/.taskrc). Let’s take at the defaults:

# [Created by task 2.5.1 2/9/2017 16:39:14]
# Taskwarrior program configuration file.
# For more documentation, see http://taskwarrior.org or try 'man task', 'man task-color',
# 'man task-sync' or 'man taskrc'

# Here is an example of entries that use the default, override and blank values
#   variable=foo   -- By specifying a value, this overrides the default
#   variable=      -- By specifying no value, this means no default
#   #variable=foo  -- By commenting out the line, or deleting it, this uses the default

# Use the command 'task show' to see all defaults and overrides

# Files
data.location=~/.task

# Color theme (uncomment one to use)
#include /usr//usr/share/task/light-16.theme
#include /usr//usr/share/task/light-256.theme
#include /usr//usr/share/task/dark-16.theme
#include /usr//usr/share/task/dark-256.theme
#include /usr//usr/share/task/dark-red-256.theme
#include /usr//usr/share/task/dark-green-256.theme
#include /usr//usr/share/task/dark-blue-256.theme
#include /usr//usr/share/task/dark-violets-256.theme
#include /usr//usr/share/task/dark-yellow-green.theme
#include /usr//usr/share/task/dark-gray-256.theme
#include /usr//usr/share/task/dark-gray-blue-256.theme
#include /usr//usr/share/task/solarized-dark-256.theme
#include /usr//usr/share/task/solarized-light-256.theme
#include /usr//usr/share/task/no-color.theme

The only active option right now is data.location=~/.task. To view active configuration settings (including the built-in defaults), run show.

task show

To change a setting, use config.

$ task config displayweeknumber no
Are you sure you want to add 'displayweeknumber' with a value of 'no'? (yes/no) yes
Config file /home/link/.taskrc modified.

Examples

These are just some of the things you can do with Taskwarrior.

Assign a project to your tasks:

task 'Fix leak in the roof' modify project:Home

Use start to mark what you were working on. This can help you remember what you were working on after the weekend:

task 'Fix bug #141291' start

Use relevant tags:

task add 'Clean gutters' +weekend +house

Be sure to read the complete documentation to learn all the ways you can catalog and organize your tasks.