Calcurse & Todo.Txt for GTD

Calcurse is a text-based calendar and scheduling application, it uses flat, human readable files for holding data about your calendar, appointments, and todo list. The app can import and export ical files though now automatically.

Todo.txt is a simple and extensible shell script for managing your todo.txt file. With a couple changes to todo.txt’s config file you can set it to write the ~/.calcurse/todo file giving you the ability, after adding a bash alias, to issue a command like this functionality is lacking in the current Calcurse.

Edit:

~/todo.cfg

# === EDIT FILE LOCATIONS BELOW ===

# Your todo.txt directory
export TODO_DIR=”/home/yourusername/.calcurse” <– change the TODO_DIR to your .calcurse directory and username
#export TODO_DIR=”C:/Documents and Settings/gina/My Documents”

# Your todo/done/report.txt locations
export TODO_FILE=”$TODO_DIR/todo” <– remove file extension
export DONE_FILE=”$TODO_DIR/done.txt”
export REPORT_FILE=”$TODO_DIR/report.txt”
export TMP_FILE=”$TODO_DIR/todo.tmp”

Add items to your todo list in Calcurse

t add buy groceries

or

Quicky mark and item done and archvie it, making it invisible to the todo list but still kept as a list of completed actions.

t do 2

2 refers to the line number in the todo file.

When adding or editing todo items in Calcurse you can assign priorities [1] being the most important [9] being the least. You can do this on the command line with todotxt-cli by adding [1] or simular priority number to the task and include your designations for +projects and @contexts.

t add [3] finish howto

Starting Calcuruse or running

t archive 

reorders and backups your list. Your items marked done via todotxt-cli will still show up in

t listall

but will not show up on your Calcurse todo list as current items.

For me, with the inclusion of Mutt provides a complete solution for productivity, including human readable text files and the ability, if you run conky, to have your appointments and todo list on your desktop. See this link for screenshots of my todo list.

if you use either of these apps or just like the ideas of a cli approach to getting things done please share your ideas on ways to integrate the two further. I’m currently working on a howto for the setup.

I wrote the author of Calcurse posing three questions I had before writing my howto.

He sent me a response shortly:

So it looks like the current functionality is the extent of the functionality for now, making any further HowTo tough until one of the three things comes about. He did mention that a couple of command line flags would be a good thing, and possibly implemented in the next release. Unfortunately he is unable to give any sort of idea of when that might be due to his schedule.