I am a big fan of productivity tools. I love utilities that make my life better. Life-hacking is the term. I use a great tool called Things. However, it has some big draw backs. First off it is centralized to one file. You can organize it by projects and areas of responsibility. Thing is this didn't fit well with organizing tasks to specific programming projects.

It seems silly to have pick up the milk mixed with a project for my latest development project (add newMigration() method to MainController). Because of this development todos in Things wasn't contextually appropriate. I code on the command line and should have my project's todo on the command line (think: ssh). Not only that but it was centralized and not scoped to each project.

(Finally Things doesn't have cloud syncing but bonjour syncing which is impossible while at work! You listening Cultured Code? The syncing problem makes Omnifocus look good!)

So to the terminal… I found this great app called TaskWarrior which is a very full featured task manager. It is GTD on the command line. Trouble is it was centralized to one database as well. Tons of features but I still wanted my databases based per project (directory) and optionally commit the database to version control.

Developer Todo List

To the rescue is this gem called the Dev Todo. It is a task manager that uses an XML file in the current directory. It's so simple it's stupid. However, it is not without some great features. I use this to keep track of what I need or want to do with a project. Basically a simple note taking. The command line is simple and it's quick. You have a great level of flexibility since the data is nothing but a simple XML file which is well formatted and intuitive to understand. But who edits data manually. The program will output, organize, manage, and track tasks with color! It has hierarchy and it can link to multiple other databases.

Here is how I've used it. In my Rails app I had a master .todo file in the root directory of the app. I stored all the main tasks there. I also made a todo in the test directory then linked them.

$ tda -p medium add new action for :print in main_controller.rb
Index of new item is 1
$ cd test
$ tda -p medium refactor unit tests
Index of new item is 1
$ tda -p medium refactor functional tests
Index of new item is 2
$ todo --title Testing
$ cd ..
$ tdl -p high test/.todo
$ todo +
  1.Testing
      1.refactor unit tests
      2.refactor functional tests
  2.add new action :print for main_controller.rb

I can't say enough cool things about this app. Perhaps I'll write more at a later time but it has saved me. It is now one of my must haves in development.