Manage tasks and projects on Fedora with Taskwarrior

There are a multitude of applications to manage your todo list. One of these apps is Taskwarrior, it allows you to manage your task in the terminal without a GUI. This article will show you how to get started using it.

What is Taskwarrior?

Taskwarrior is CLI task manager and organizer. It is flexible, fast, and unobtrusive. It does its job then gets out of your way.

Taskwarrior uses $HOME/.taskrc and $HOME/.task to store your settings and tasks respectively.

Getting started with Taskwarrior

It’s easy to use the Taskwarrior to add your daily missions. These are some simple commands. To add tasks:

$ task add buy milk 
Created task 1. 
$ task add buy eggs
 Created task 2. 
$ task add bake cake 
Created task 3.

To list your tasks, you can use the task command on its own for the simplest listing:

$ task 

ID Age Description    Urg
  1 17s buy milk       0
  2 14s buy eggs       0
  3 11s bake cake      0

3 tasks.

To mark a task as complete, use the done keyword:

$ task 1 done
 Completed task 1 'buy milk'.
 Completed 1 task.
$ task 2 done
 Completed task 2 'buy eggs'.
 Completed 1 task.
$ task
 [task next]
 ID Age Description Urg
  1 57s bake cake      0
 1 task

Diving deeper into Taskwarrior

Priority management

Taskwarrior (task) is designed to help prioritize your tasks. To do this, task has multiple implicit and explicit variables it can use to determine an “Urgency” value.

Consider the following list.

$ task
 [task next]
 ID Age  Description    Urg
  1 2min buy eggs          0
  2 2min buy flour         0
  3 2min bake cake         0
  4 2min pay rent          0
  5 3s   install fedora    0
 5 tasks

One could argue that paying your rent and installing Fedora have a higher priority than baking a cake. You can tell task about this by using the pri modifier.

$ task 4 mod pri:H
 Modifying task 4 'pay rent'.
 Modified 1 task.
$ task 5 mod pri:M
 Modifying task 5 'install fedora'.
 Modified 1 task.
$ task
 [task next]
 ID Age  P Description    Urg
  4 4min H pay rent          6
  5 2min M install fedora  3.9
  1 4min   buy eggs          0
  2 4min   buy flour         0
  3 4min   bake cake         0
 5 tasks

Rent is very important, it has a due date that we need to pay it by, such as within 3 days from the 1st of the month. You can tell task this by using the due modifier.

$ task 4 mod due:3rd
 Modifying task 4 'pay rent'.
 Modified 1 task.
$ task
 [task next]
 ID Age   P Due Description    Urg
  4 12min H 2d  pay rent       13.7
  5 10min M     install fedora  3.9
  1 12min       buy eggs          0
  2 12min       buy flour         0
  3 12min       bake cake         0
 5 tasks
$ date
 Sat Feb 29 11:59:29 STD 2020

Because the 3rd of next month is nearby, the urgency value of rent has skyrocketed, and will continue to do so once we have reached and passed the due date.

However, not all tasks need to be done right away. Say for example you don’t want to worry about paying your rent until it is posted on the first of the month. You can tell taskwarrior about this using the wait modifier. (Hint: in the following example, som is short for “start of month,” one of the shortcuts taskwarrior understands.)

$ task 4 mod wait:som
 Modifying task 4 'pay rent'.
 Modified 1 task.
$ task
 [task next]
 ID Age   P Description    Urg
  5 14min M install fedora  3.9
  1 16min   buy eggs          0
  2 16min   buy flour         0
  3 16min   bake cake         0
 4 tasks

You will no longer be able to see the pay rent task until the start of the month. You can view waiting tasks by using task waiting:

$ task waiting
 ID Age   P Wait       Remaining Due        Description
  4 18min H 2020-03-01       11h 2020-03-03 pay rent
 1 task

There are a few other modifiers you can define. Schedule and until will place a “start” date and remove a task after a date respectfully.

You may have tasks that require other tasks to be completed. To add a dependency for other tasks, use the dep modifier:

$ task
 [task next]
 ID Age   P Description    Urg
  5 30min M install fedora  3.9
  1 33min   buy eggs          0
  2 33min   buy flour         0
  3 33min   bake cake         0
 4 tasks
$ task 3 mod dep:1,2
 Modifying task 3 'bake cake'.
 Modified 1 task.
 $ task
 [task next]
 ID Age   Deps P Description    Urg
  1 33min        buy eggs          8
  2 33min        buy flour         8
  5 31min      M install fedora  3.9
  3 33min 1 2    bake cake        -5
 4 tasks

This will modify the priorities of any tasks that is blocking a task. Now buying eggs and flour is more urgent because it is preventing you from performing a task.

Annotations

You can add notes to a task using task <number> annotate:

$ task 3 anno No blueberries  
Annotating task 3 'bake cake'.  
Annotated 1 task. 
$ task  [task next]  
ID Age Deps P Description                 Urg   
1 1h         buy eggs                       8   
2 1h         buy flour                      8   
5 1h       M install fedora               3.9   
3 1h  1 2    bake cake                   -4.2                        2020-02-29 No blueberries  4 tasks

Organizing tasks

Tasks can be assigned to projects and tagged by using the project modifier and adding a tag using the + sign followed by the tag name, such as +problem.

Putting it all together

You can combine everything you learned to create a task in one line with all the required options.

$ task add Write Taskwarrior post \
pri:M due:1m wait:som until:due+2w sche:15th \
project:magazine +taskwarrior +community +linux

 Created task 6.
 The project 'magazine' has changed.  Project 'magazine' is 0% complete (1 task remaining).
$ task 6
 No command specified - assuming 'information'.
 Name          Value
 ID            6
 Description   Write Taskwarrior post
 Status        Waiting
 Project       magazine
 Entered       2020-02-29 13:50:27 (6s)
 Waiting until 2020-03-01 00:00:00
 Scheduled     2020-03-15 00:00:00
 Due           2020-03-30 14:50:27
 Until         2020-04-13 14:50:27
 Last modified 2020-02-29 13:50:27 (6s)
 Tags          taskwarrior community linux
 Virtual tags  SCHEDULED TAGGED UDA UNBLOCKED UNTIL WAITING YEAR LATEST PROJECT PRIORITY
 UUID          27768737-f6a2-4515-af9d-4f58773c76a5
 Urgency        5.3
 Priority      M

Installing Taskwarrior on Fedora

$ sudo dnf install task

$ sudo rpm-ostree install task 

Tips and tricks

• Taskwarrior has a hook system, meaning that there are many tools you can plug in, such as bugwarrior!
• Taskwarrior can connect to a taskserver for server/client setups. (This is left as an exercise for the reader for now.)

Photo by Bogdan Kupriets on Unsplash.