How I keep track of my to-dos using plain text

There are plenty of applications that track to-dos. From simple applications that just store your todos to full featured multi-user platforms. But in most cases all you need is a simple text file which you can format to your preference. I love the simplicity of text files. The choice of formatting is up to one’s imagination.

I have one file with each line representing a todo. If the line starts with a — I consider it to be incomplete and a + denotes its complete. It is a simple principle and the Unix environment has several tools to help me sort and organize this. But when I want to synchronize this with my mobile the problem begins. Despite having several tools to synchronize files it is quite a task to replicate the scriptable Unix environment. And this is where Saola comes in.

Saola, for the uninitiated is a scriptable notes platform. You can extend your plain text notes with scripts written in JavaScript. This is quite familiar to what you would do on a Unix box. It renders your text as markdown so you have some formatting. Let me show you how I work with todos using Saola.

I have one file named Todos and it looks like this:

### Todo
- Book flights to Paris #travel
- Read "Practical Common Lisp" #book
- Create an account on Saola https://saola.in/#register
- Read Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid #book
- Watch The Martian #movies

### Done
+ Send email to Ross
+ Finish recording this video #task

### Meta
* Cleanup: https://saola.in/#x/demo/jmwmbihesq

Saola renders it as:

Rendering Markdown

But as you can see maintaining this list would be quite cumbersome. When I complete a task I would have to change the — to a + and then move it to the ### Done section. With Saola this becomes easy as all I have to do is write a script that automatically reorganizes the file. So I can change the — to a + when I am done with a task and execute the script that reorganizes the file. Here is the script that I use to reorganize the file:

var fileName = "demo/b453vgmgq4";
var original = saola.read(fileName);
var content = original.content;
var todos = content.match(/[^\r\n]+/g);

var undone = [];
var done = [];
var meta = [];
for (var i=0; i<todos.length; i++) {
    var todo = todos[i];
    if (todo[0] === "-" ){
        undone.push(todo);
    } else if (todo[0] === "+") {
        done.push(todo);
    } else if (todo[0] === "*") {
        meta.push(todo);
    }
}

var content = "### Todo\n";
for (var i=0; i<undone.length; i++) {
    content += undone[i] + "\n";
}
content += "### Done\n"
for (var i=0; i<done.length; i++) {
    content += done[i] + "\n";
}
content += "### Meta\n"
for (var i=0; i<meta.length; i++) {
    content += meta[i] + "\n";
}
saola.update(fileName, content);
println("**Updated** https://saola.in/#", fileName);

As you can see Saola exposes a few functions that help in reorganizing the file: saola.read, saola.updateand println. The above script moves all lines starting with — to ### Todo, + to ### Done and * to ### Meta sections respectively.

Since I have added tags in the todos with # I can also write a script to sort according to tags.

var content = saola.read("demo/b453vgmgq4").content;
var todos = content.match(/[^\r\n]+/g);

var undone = {};
for (var i=0; i<todos.length; i++) {
    var todo = todos[i];
    if (todo[0] !== "-") continue;
    var tags = todo.match(/\#[a-zA-Z]+/g);
    if (tags === null || tags === undefined){
        tags = ["#rest"];
    }
    for (var t=0; t<tags.length; t++) {
        var tag = tags[t].replace("#", "");
        if (undone[tag] === undefined){ 
            undone[tag] = [];
        }
        undone[tag].push(todo);
    }
}

for (var key in undone) {
    if (!(undone.hasOwnProperty(key))) {
        continue;
    }
    var todos = undone[key];
    if (todos === undefined) continue;
    println("**", key, "**");
    for (var i=0; i<todos.length; i++) {
        var todo = todos[i]
        if (key !== "rest") {
            todo = todo.replace("#"+key, "");
        }
        println(todo);
    }
    println("");
}

println("https://saola.in/#demo/b453vgmgq4");

Running this script produces:

Sorting Todos

Having a scriptable platform allows you to create workflows that would be impossible with usual tools. I keep track of expenses, list of books I need to read, articles that I want to read later and several other things. I just love the simplicity.

Give it a try, register at https://saola.in/#register or try it without registering try it out here: https://saola.in/#tk/bac3lryfdohxim3yhfckalaxzggeby6a