Managing Tasks from the Command Line with TaskWarrior

TaskWarrior

Linux has many graphical desktop environments. Eventhough Gnome and KDE sports fully fledged and rich graphical user experience, using the command line would be much handier and faster to get certain things done. Indeed, using a command-line is blazingly fast yet powerful. This time, we are going to show you how to manage your day-to-day tasks with this powerful command-line program called TaskWarrior.

Basically, TaskWarrior is a command-line todo list manager. It allows you to add, remove, prioritize and manipulate your tasks more easily. TaskWarrior is a project that empowers task adding more features like color themes, GTD features, LUA plugins, data sync and so forth.

Installing TaskWarrior

The latest stable version of it is 1.9.2. As it’s a more active project it’ll dramatically get updates. Okay, now let’s go ahead and install TaskWarrior.

Ubuntu users, add their repo to your sources list by running the following command in the terminal.

Now update your sources and install it by the following commands.

Other Linux users can get the source file from here: TaskWarrior Download

Using TaskWarrior

Once the TaskWarrior is installed, just run task from the command-line and it’ll ask whether you want to create a default configuration. Type “y” and enter. You can use it right away or you can edit the configuration file located in your home directory called, .taskrc

Let’s get started with it now.

Adding Tasks

In the terminal just type task add <name of your task>. For instance if you want to read a book. It’ll be like:

You can add many tasks as you wish.

Adding Tasks

Listing the tasks

You can access your added tasks by simply typing

task ls

Or you can simply type task and get a detailed list

Listing Tasks

Adding Deadlines

If you want to add deadlines the format is like this:

task add <name of the task> due:<date> (Without the brackets)

Setting Priorities

The format is: task add priority:H <task name> (Without the brackets)

For instance,

Deleting Tasks

First get a your current list by the task ls command and let’s say you want to delete the first entry,

Deleting Tasks

Well, I have covered the most basic steps of it. Here’s their official tutorial that will really amaze you on what it’s capable of.

http://taskwarrior.org/wiki/taskwarrior/Simple

It’s might seem harsh at the beginning but believe me, once you master the commands you won’t ever go back to a GUI-based todo list.