odilf's site

I don't like how I have my TODOs organized, but I really need TODOs to make my life work. Sometimes it makes me a bit uncomfortable thinking that I can't do work unless I have some system to keep track of what I do, but it is the reality of the situation. The moment I realized that instead of having to remember a variable number of variable things to do constantly, I could just offload everything to one place and the only thing I had to do was check that place was magical.

The thing I dislike about my current system is that I use Todoist. I don't dislike Todoist. Of all the task managers I've tried, it's pretty clearly my favorite. But... I can't rely on it that much. Features are behind paywalls and, more importantly, the development team. If I want to do something specific my way, it's just not going to be possible if I need something that is not there. In general I always try to keep everything more organized but I feel that Todoist is missing some features.

The point is that I want to try having my TODOs in a todo.txt file. I can sync that with my phone, I can edit it with a text editor but I can also use a nicer GUI program. There's 0 vendor lock in. Even with other open source options, if the format is some random format that a program thought of then I have to hope that that is supported everywhere I want. Case in point, most of them don't work nicely on a phone. But if it's just a todo.txt even if there aren't apps (which there are), you can still just edit it as plaintext.

Cli programs

todo-txt-cli

First thing you get when running it is Fatal Error: Cannot read configuration file /Users/odilf/.todo/config. Ok... can I get some help?

$ todo.sh --help
Usage: todo.sh [-fhpantvV] [-d todo_config] action [task_number] [task_description]
Try 'todo.sh -h' for more information.

And yeah I know I can do -h, but this user experience is enough of a red flag to me. Seems very archaic, I don't want to delve further.

topydo

It's interesting... But I'm not feeling it.

ttdl

You know what. I'm kind of disappointed. This program seems to be the best one but it is pretty obtuse... In general I feel the dream shattering.

Gui programs

sleek

Honestly when I saw this program I realized that this might have some interest.

But, candidly, it's not that good. It looks amateurish and very electron-y.

Conclusion as of May 4th, 2025.

I'm not using any kind of todo.txt system. It definitely doesn't seem to be worth the hassle, for now. This experience has made me consider going towards 2 directions:

Just use a big, heavyweight, probaby close sourced system like Asana... (huh, seems like plane is a good open source alternative!)
Just make my own thing exactly how I want it to be...