Productivity Hack: ToDos In Sublime Text

Photo by Workshop& on Unsplash

In this blog post, I am not going into the details of why it’s essential to keep a daily to-do list. Instead, I am going to show you how I use the sublime to create the to-do list.

I use a sublime text editor to write down almost everything crucial to me, right from creating some short text to the lengthy notes. I also have a habit of keeping track of my daily activities.

A few days back, I came across an excellent plugin for the sublime, PlainTasks, which made creating and managing the to-do list fun to me. Let’s see how we can utilize this plugin to make sublime more powerful.

We are going to cover the following things in this blog:

• How to install the plugin?
• How to create a to-do list file?
• How to create a to-do item?
• How to change the status of the to-do item?
• How to organize the to-do items?
• How to filter the to-do items?
• How to track progress and get status report?
• Some Customizations

Installing the Plugin:

We can add or remove any plugin in the sublime using a Package Control. A Command Palette drives the Package control.

• To open the Command Palette press ⇧⌘P.
• All the command related to the Package Control starts with the words “Package Control:”. To install a plugin, type Package control: Install Package and press enter. This action will load all available packages that are available for install from the default channel, plus any from repositories you have added.

Install Package Using Package Control

• The sublime will open Command Palette again, after loading all available packages. This time type “PlainTasks”, and hit return or enter key to install the PlainTasks plugin.

Install PlainTasks

• After, Successful installation, you can access its setting via preferences. That’s it, and now we can create a to-do list in the sublime itself.

Access Settings In Preferences

• All actions of PlainTasks start with tasks:. To see all of the options supported by PlainTasks type tasks: on Command Palette.

Create a File:

• First, we need to create a file to hold our to-do list.
• Press ⇧⌘P to open Command Palette, then type tasks: new document and hit return/enter to create a file.
• The extension of this file will be .todo.

Create a To-Do item:

• Press ⌘+I or ⌘+return to add a to-do item.
• By default, the status of the newly created item is “not completed”.

Change The Status of The Item:

• Use ⌘+D to change the status of the item from “not completed” to “completed”, and vice versa.
• Use ^+C (control +C) to set the status of the item to the canceled.

Changing status of task.

Create Headers/Sections:

• We use headers all the time to organize similar items in the same section or category.
• We can convert any line into a header by ending it with a colon “:”. In the above image, the Machine SetUp is the section header.

Create Sublist of Items:

• We can even create a sublist inside an item by just indenting it. The cool part of this feature is, we can fold and unfold it.

List folding and unfolding.

• We can organize the list using the header and sublist, as shown in the above image.

Filter the to-do items:

• We can tag an item using @ symbol. There are few predefined tags available like created, due, critical, high, low, etc. whose purpose is self-explanatory.
• We can also have our custom tag just by writing an @ symbol in front of our tag name.
• The advantage of associating a tag with a to-do item is that we can later filter the list based on that tag.

Filter by tag

Track Progress And Get Status Report:

• The PlainTasks keep displaying the progress status for our to-do list at the bottom bar of the page.
• To get the printed report, bring up the command palette and type Tasks: Copy Statistics. This action will copy the current status of your activities on the clipboard. For the above task list, we will get the following statistics:

7/10 done (70%) ■■■■■■■□□□ Last task @done (19–01–20 11:00)

Customizations:

• We can customize the look and feel of our to-do list by changing the default configuration values. We can find the default configuration in the preferences of the PlainTasks plugin (Refer below image).
• Don’t make any changes in the default settings file. Instead, add only those properties which you want to change in the user settings file. The values provided in the user settings file will override the values in the default settings file.
• This approach will be beneficial if we need to switch back to the default configuration in the future.
• The configuration file takes the attributes in the JSON form.

PlainTasks Settings

• You can take reference from the Settings-Default file to know the list of things that you can customize and their possible value.
• Find below the configuration settings which I have used to customize my to-do list file:

My Custom Configuration

Thanks for reading this blog. I hope you enjoyed it and learned something. If you have any suggestions or questions, please add it in the comment below, Happy Learning 👏.

References:

• The Official Website For Sublime Text Editor.
• Github Page For PlainTasks by Aziz.

For More Productivity Hacks:

Productivity Hacks