NAME¶

task-tutorial - A tutorial for the task(1) command line todo manager.

DESCRIPTION¶

This tutorial contains a narrative and a series of commands that lead you through different scenarios and illustrate the capabilities of taskwarrior. We will begin with basic usage, and progress to the more powerful features. It is recommended that you work through these examples alongside this tutorial. Make your terminal window as wide as you can, to properly see the formatted output of this page. Taskwarrior has many features and you will probably not use them all, but there are likely to be several capabilities that work well with your style of managing tasks. Everyone has different usage patterns. This is therefore a complete list of capabilities, and you should choose accordingly.

BASIC USAGE¶

Let's get started. We're planning a party, and there is a lot of work to do, so let's capture these tasks, by using the 'add' command. The '$' prompt shows that these are commands that you type (don't include the $ symbol yourself), and lines without the prompt are those displayed by taskwarrior. Let's take a look at our tasks so far. Now I've already ordered a cake, so rather than 'add' this, I'm going to 'log' it. This just means that I want to keep track of the task, but I've already done it. It saves me a step. As for those invitations, I'm going to need to design them first. And I'm also going to need print them. Here we are duplicating a task and making a substitution. Notice how the commands can be abbreviated, provided they are still unique. That looks good - but now I think of it, I already have my guest list, so I can mark that one as done. And that's basic usage, and you already know enough to be productive using taskwarrior. If you stopped here, you would be perfectly able to manage your task list. But if you want to see what it can really do, keep reading...

PROJECTS¶

Remember to pay the rent at the end of the month. Oh, that was sloppy, but it can be fixed with a global substitution, represented by the 'g' at the end. You could omit the 'g', and it would only make the first substitution. We can now use projects to separate home chores from the party preparation. Let's assign that last task to the 'home' project. Note that a task may only belong to one project. And we will put those first six tasks in the 'party' project. See how we specify a range of tasks? Taskwarrior will want to confirm bulk changes like this, but we'll accept all changes here. Now that we have multiple projects, as shown here, we can use project as a filter for the list report. You can see again that we can abbreviate 'list' and 'project', but when we abbreviate 'party', we are filtering all the projects that begin with 'par'.

PRIORITIES¶

Priorities are another way to organize tasks. You can use priority values of high, medium and low, and taskwarrior knows these as H, M or L. You can remove priorities by specifying a blank value.

TAGS¶

A task may only have one project, but it may have any number of tags, which are just single words associated with the task. I can go to the print shop at the mall, and do all the invitation tasks, so let's tag them all. The long report shows tags, too, and I can use tags as a filter to any report too. I made a mistake - I can't mail out the invitations at the mall, so let's remove that tag.

MODIFICATIONS¶

Task 7 is not worded correctly, so I can modify that by specifying a task ID and a new description. This is also considered a bulk change, and so requires confirmation. We'll need music. I can prepend, and I can append to a task. I can also go straight into an editor and modify anything. The task is formatted and you can edit anything you like, and the changes will be detected and made to the task. Sometimes the command line will confuse the shell. In this case, what would happen if there was a file named 'bands' in the current directory? The shell might expand that wild-card, so to avoid that, you can escape the wild-card, or quote the whole description. You can also use the minus minus operator which tells taskwarrior to stop being clever and interpret the rest of the arguments as a task description. Otherwise, that +dj would be interpreted as a tag. We don't really need a band, so the easiest way to get rid of that task is to undo the last change. Taskwarrior has a complete undo stack, so you can undo all the way back to the beginning. The undo operation gets rid of the task completely, but I could also have just deleted the task, then the deletion itself would be tracked, and also undo-able.

INFO¶

During that undo operation, taskwarrior displayed metadata that is associated with the task. You can display this with the info command.

ANNOTATIONS¶

Annotations are little notes that can be added to a task. There can be any number, and each has a time stamp. Annotations can be removed by providing a matching pattern.

CONFIGURATION¶

There is a 'show' command, that is used to display the active configuration. There are hundreds of settings that can be changed, and every one has a sensible default. If you want a complete list of all the settings and their meanings, read the man page. The 'config' command is used to modify the settings, and in this case the configuration variable 'answer' is given the value of forty-two. The 'show' command indicates that the value was changed, and also that the variable is unrecognized. The show command performs a detailed check on your configuration, and alerts you to several kinds of problem. The config command can also remove a value. A very powerful feature is the ability to override the configuration variables temporarily. Here I am requesting an ascending sort on the description field only. The value in the configuration file is prefixed with 'rc.' to identify its namespace.

DEFAULTS¶

There is a default command, which can be set to anything, in this case it is set to the 'list' report. Then running taskwarrior with no command name runs the default command. I can also specify a default priority and project, which means that any tasks added will use them, unless an alternative is provided. Let's just revert those changes, to clean up.

ALIASES¶

You can create aliases to effectively rename commands. You can abbreviate those, too.

COLOR¶

[Note that you will see color in your terminal as you work through this tutorial, but you will not see the color in the man page. This is a limitation of man pages in general. The text shown (without color) is included here.] All the examples so far have been shown with color turned off. How about some color? What you see is the result of a set of color rules being applied to the tasks. There is a hierarchy of color rules that colorize a task based on the metadata. Taskwarrior supports 256 colors on certain terminal emulators, and this shows the range of colors available. Note that your terminal may show fewer colors. This is how to show a color sample. Or samples of all the active color settings. Themes are a simple way to use coordinated color schemes so by including a color theme into the configuration file, you can see some striking effects. For a blue theme, add this line to your .taskrc file: For a red theme: For a general dark theme: Here are two color rules that specify a dark blue background for all tasks that are part of the 'party' project, and uses bold to identify any tasks with the keyword 'invitations' in the description. There is a man page with a writeup of all the color capabilities.

ACTIVE TASKS¶

I'm selecting a venue, so let's indicate that task 2 is active by starting it. See how active tasks are affected by the color rules. There is an active report that shows only active tasks, and you can mark any active task as inactive, by stopping it. There is a journalling feature that records the start and stop times as annotations.

DUE DATES¶

Due dates can be specified as dates, durations into the future or past, mnemonic, ordinal or day of week. Some of these dates are in the past, so now you see there are overdue tasks. Due dates have different colors for due, imminent, today and overdue values. You can also choose the format - for input and output.

CALENDAR¶

When tasks have due dates, you can see them on the calendar. Taskwarrior provides sample holiday files for countries where taskwarrior is used most. You can create your own, or use one of the samples to show holidays on the calendar. Try adding this line to your ~/.taskrc file: Then: There are holiday files for be-BY, cs-CZ, da-DK, de-AT, de-DE, en-CA, en-GB, en-NZ, en-US, es-ES, fr-FR, it-IT, nb-NO, nl-NL and sv-SE locales. You can see the whole year, see due tasks as well, and see the holidays:

RECURRENCE¶

Remember the task we added to pay the rent? We're going to need to do that every month. Recurring tasks allow us to set up a single task that keeps coming back, just as you'd expect. You can also limit the extent of the recurrence. Let's make sure the task doesn't recur after the lease ends. And there is a recurring report that shows you only the recurring tasks. To illustrate a point, let's set up a recurring annual task as a reminder to pay taxes, and put the due date in the past. This will cause task to fill in the gaps, and create a series of severely overdue tasks. Deletions to recurring tasks can be escalated to include all the recurrences of a task.

SHELL¶

You can use the shell command to create a more immersive environment. Any task command you run outside the shell can also be run inside the shell, without the need to prefix every command with "task".

SPECIAL TAGS¶

You've seen tags, but there are also 'special tags' that have effects on individual tasks. The 'nocolor' special tag causes the color rules to be bypassed. Special tags are highlighted by the 'tags' command. There are others - the 'nonag' special tag prevents the generation of nag messages when you work on low priority tasks when there are more important ones. The 'nocal' special tag will prevent a task from appearing on the calendar.

WAITING¶

When you have a task with a due date that is far out into the future, you may want to hide that task for a while. You can provide a wait date for a task, and it will remain hidden until that date. It will no longer be cluttering your task list, but it is still there, and visible using the 'waiting' report. When the wait date comes, the task will just reappear in the list. To illustrate this, let's set up a task with a very short wait time of five seconds. It's gone. Now we wait five seconds, then: And it's back. Now we delete it.

DEPENDENCIES¶

Taskwarrior supports dependencies. Let's take a look at the party planning tasks, and assign dependencies. Let's see. I can't mail invitations until they are printed. I can't print them until I design them. I need to select a weekend before a location. Design depends on location and weekend. And the caterer needs to know where. Let's take a look. All my tasks are blocked except task 1. That makes sense. Hmm, that double dependency isn't right. Here are the blocked tasks, and the opposite, the unblocked tasks. If we look at task 1 closely, we can see that it is blocking 2 and 4. And if we look at task 2, we see that it is blocked by 1, and blocking 5. This is called a dependency chain, which is a string of tasks that are all connected not only by their project, but by dependencies. Now we understand that task 1 should be done first, but you may still violate the laws of physics if you wish. Let's complete task 2 and see what happens. Taskwarrior realizes what you are doing, and offers to fix the dependency chain to reflect what you have done.

REPORTS¶

Taskwarrior has a good many reports. There is a report with minimal information: There is the basic report: There is the most common report: There is a report with most of the data shown: There is a report containing all tasks, old and new: There is a report showing completed work: There is a report showing recurring tasks only: There is a report to show all the waiting tasks: There is a report showing all the tasks that are blocked via dependencies by other tasks: There is a report showing tasks that are not blocked by dependencies: There is a report showing the oldest tasks: There is a report showing the newest tasks: There is a report showing the completed and started tasks, by week: And "what should I work on next?" This one can be useful because it pulls a few of the highest priority tasks from all the projects.

CUSTOM REPORTS¶

You can even define your own custom report. Let's quickly create a custom report - we'll call it foo - and I can choose from a long list of fields to include in the report, but I want to see the ID, the date when I entered the task, and the description. I can specify the labels for those columns, the sort order of the report, and I can filter. Custom reports also show up on the help output. I can inspect the configuration. And they can be run just like the other reports.

CHARTS¶

The history report gives monthly totals of tasks added, completed and deleted. There is also an annual version. There is a graphical monthly and annual version. [These charts do not show up in a man page] There is a project summary report that shows progress in all the projects.

ADVANCED FILTERS¶

Filters are a very powerful tool. First here is an unfiltered list, which shows all tasks. Now again, but with the text 'invit', which acts as a filter on the description field. This is the equivalent form using attribute modifiers. In this example we are filtering on descriptions that contain the word fragment. Here we are using the 'contains' modifier, but there are many others. All tasks containing the whole word 'the'. See how annotations are also searched? Here is a list of all tasks that do not contain the whole word 'invitations'. Here list all tasks in the 'party' project. And the full equivalent. Here list tasks that are not in the 'party' project. I could have also used 'isnt' here - there are several synonyms for modifiers, so that the filter can be written so that it reads naturally. Here the 'over' modifier is filtering on priorities that sort higher than 'Low', and also filtering on the 'party' project. There are two terms in this filter. Same again, but only show me the first two tasks. Now all tasks, but just show the first page of tasks. I don't have a page full of tasks here, but you get the idea. Now you can see how some of the built-in reports work. The 'list' report is just all tasks, filtered so that only the pending tasks are shown. The 'waiting' report is similarly defined.

HELP¶

You'll find a quick reference page built in, with the 'help' command, or perhaps you'll want to take a look at the several man pages installed.

CREDITS & COPYRIGHTS¶

Copyright (C) 2006 - 2013 P. Beckingham, F. Hernandez. This man page was originally written by Federico Hernandez, and has been modified and supplemented by Paul Beckingham. Taskwarrior is distributed under the MIT license. See http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php for more information.

SEE ALSO¶

task(1), taskrc(5), task-faq(5), task-color(5), task-sync(5) For more information regarding task, the following may be referenced:

The official site at

<http://taskwarrior.org>

 

The official code repository at

<git://tasktools.org/task.git/>

 

You can contact the project by writing an email to

<support@taskwarrior.org>

 

REPORTING BUGS¶

Bugs in task may be reported to the issue-tracker at

<http://taskwarrior.org>