tasknvimwrrior - nvim as a UI for taskwarrior

November 25th, 2017
neovimtaskwarrior

tasknvimwrrior - nvim as a UI for taskwarrior

A super-quick one for today.

So, for input and quick interaction with Taskwarrior, I use the command line. Like, duh, it’s kind of the whole point, isn’t?

But sometimes, I want to act on whole lists. And for that I want something just a tad more user interfacey than the command line.

So I reached out for Neovim-RPC and wrote a very quick and dirty UI. Basically, it does two main things: it lists a set of tasks in a table format (and then I leverage the TableMode vim plugin to take care of making it pretty), and it ferries back and forth edit commands like “add this tag”, “give me the list of all the high priority tasks”, etc.

Oh yeah, and it’s alpha software at its best. How alpha? I’m going to deploy the modules minutes before I publish that blog entry. That’s how alpha. Caveat emptor, peeps, caveat as much as you can possibly emptor.

How to install

Simple! Well, somewhat simple. Maybe…

First, you install Neovim-RPC and configure nvim to use it. (I dearly hope the instructions in that module are up-to-date. If not, they will (eventually) be)

Then you install Neovim-RPC-Plugin-Taskwarrior as a module.

$ cpanm Neovim-RPC-Plugin-Task

Then you install both the vim glue for the plugin and the TableMode vim plugin on the neovim side. If you are using Plugged as your plugin manager, you can do it by dropping the following in yout init.vim:

Plug 'yanick/Neovim-RPC-Plugin-Taskwarrior'
Plug 'dhruvasagar/vim-table-mode', {
     'on': [ 'TableModeEnable' ]
 }

And then, in theory, you’re set. To invoke the UI right off the bat, you can do

$ nvim -c 'call Task()`

and magic will happen.

Show me!

This is something that is better shown than explained. So here’s an asciivid where I

  • open the UI. It’ll show all pending tasks by default. The columns displayed are the emergency level, the priority, the due date (if any), the description, tags, the project, the last modified date, and, finally, the task’s sha1.
  • use the command <leader>lq (for list query) and select to only see the tasks of the oculi project.
  • get more info for one of the tasks via <leader>i (for info).
  • set all priorities of the tasks to be low via a visual selection and the command <leader>pl (for priority row).
  • reorder the table per-emergency via <leader>tS (for table sort).
  • finally mark one task as done via <leader>d.