Taskwarrior Custom Reports : Random Geekery

It happened again. I have a couple dozen great ideas for the blog. Loads of other things I need to get at as well. So yeah. I got myself a little overwhelmed, and I need to stop and get a solid idea of the top tasks: the ones I want to be working on now or soon.

I’ve been dutifully adding everything to Taskwarrior, assigning priorities as I go.

In case you forgot, or haven’t been following from the beginning , I use Taskwarrior’s Priority field to show how soon I want to work on a task. Priority:M? I want to work on it soon. Priority:H? Either I am working on it right now or I really want to be.

Time for me to figure out or in Taskwarrior.

Filtering with `or`

Filters already have an implied and. It looks like this.

How many active tasks do I have?

$ task +PENDING count
198

How many active tasks do I want to work on soon?

$ task +PENDING priority:M count
28

That’s filtering tasks to those for which +PENDING and priority:M are true.

How many active tasks do I want to be working on now?

$ task +PENDING priority:H count
6

That’s a bit much. It should be more like four or five.

How many active tasks do I want to work on now or soon? That is, which tasks are +PENDING and have either priority:M or priority:H?

We can use or to join two filters. If either of them is true for the task, that task is included. Use parentheses to build more complex filters.

$ task +PENDING (priority:H or priority:M) count
zsh: unknown file attribute: i

Tada — oops. Hang on. This stuff goes through the shell before it reaches Taskwarrior. Let’s put the filter in a string.

$ task '+PENDING (priority:H or priority:M)' count
34

Tada!

Okay, it works, but I just know there will be more typos using this filter from memory. How can I avoid typing it in every time?

Use a context

I could add that priority filter to my “focused” context, used when I need to ignore distracting ideas.

~/.taskrc

context.focused=-idea -shelved (priority:H or priority:M)

Now every report skips low priority tasks.

$ task context focused
Context 'focused' set. Use 'task context none' to remove.
$ task +PENDING count
34

This is great, but I want to know my top tasks even when I’m not in focused context.

Plus it’s easy to forget which context you’re in. I once spent 15 minutes trying to find a +work task before remembering I was still in offwork context. Which reminds me —

$ task context blog

Use a shell alias

Part of Taskwarrior’s charm is the fact that we use task from the command line. I could take advantage of that with a shell alias for task using the preface filter.

alias ttop='task +PENDING "(priority:H or priority:M)"'

This gives me sort of an on-the-fly context.

$ ttop count
34

I could use ttop with any Taskwarrior command, so ttop next would be a fine way to look at my important tasks.

But I’d kind of like to have a custom report for reviewing tasks I’ve set as important. Something with a little more information than task minimal but a bit less than task next.

Use a custom report

Might be easier to show than tell. For more of a “tell” approach, check the “REPORTS” section of man taskrc. Here’s my custom “top” report, loosely based on Taskwarrior’s minimal report.

# Almost-minimal view of tasks I want to work on most
report.top.columns=id,priority,project,tags,description.count
report.top.description='Minimal details of tasks'
report.top.filter=status:pending (priority:H or priority:M)
report.top.labels=ID,Pri,Project,Tags,Description
report.top.sort=priority-/,project-,description+

description.count column is used for the description text and the number of annotations for the task.
sort specifies columns to sort by, in descending or ascending order. priority-/ means “descending, dividing each block of priorities with a blank row.”

And here’s what my top report looks like.

$ task top
ID  Pri Project    Tags              Description
  28 H   Site       blog taskwarrior  custom reports [1]
194 H   Site       blog              describe workflow
193 H   Site       ops               use content UUID in RSS feed
192 H   Site       blog              walk through setting up webmention.io and bridgy
184 H   Make.yarn  knitting personal hemmed edge hat for diedre
185 H              ops               persist xrandr fix

170 M   VimWiki    ops               back up current wiki pages
  76 M   Site.Notes site              note pics do not need zoom link
  70 M   Site       ops               Evaluate new permalink templates
188 M   Site       ops               blogroll of indieweb folks I mentioned
114 M   Site       blog ops          clean up hard drive
198 M   Site       layout            consolidate content format
148 M   Site       ops               cron job to fetch site logs
181 M   Site       learn ops         pamac for manjaro
191 M   Site       ops               permanent local server for site
196 M   Site       blog ops          sending webmentions
  20 M   Site       layout            store link on every page
167 M   Site       ops               task to list posts via `hugo list`
147 M   Site       blog taskwarrior  taskwarrior aliases
143 M   Site       blog              testing a static website
146 M   Site       blog              update taskwarrior notes script post to show usage
197 M   OrgConfig  ops               add awesomewm settings
  30 M   Artbiz     research          coloring book options
  39 M   Artbiz     art inventory     redo Voodoo Vince for dbh
  46 M   Artbiz     art learn         udemy affinity designer course [1]
  99 M              dev readlist      Art of PostgreSQL
186 M              emacs ops         Try telega for emacs
178 M              ops               add windows option to manjaro boot
179 M              ops               folding at home fah-config
176 M              ops               get task count in status
187 M              ops               get wsl xorg emacs autostart in windows
  50 M              javascript learn  node-tap Node TAP testing library
145 M              ops               refactor sync cronjob to script
  16 M              tools             try out newsboat news reader
34 tasks
Filter: ( status = pending and ( priority = H or priority = M ) )

I can apply additional filters just like with any other report.

$  rgb-hugo (master) task project:OrgConfig top
ID  Pri Project   Tags Description
197 M   OrgConfig ops  add awesomewm settings
1 task
Filter: ( status = pending and ( priority = H or priority = M ) ) and ( project = OrgConfig )

So that’s pretty handy. But clearly I need to clean this up a bit. Some of those aren’t really things I want to work on soon. But at least now I have one less priority:H task.

You can see Taskwarrior’s settings for the minimal report, or any other, with show report.NAME:

$ task show report.minimal

Config Variable            Value
report.minimal.columns     id,project,tags.count,description.count
report.minimal.description Minimal details of tasks
report.minimal.filter      status:pending or status:waiting
report.minimal.labels      ID,Project,Tags,Description
report.minimal.sort        project+/,description+

Filtering with or

Use a context

Use a shell alias

Use a custom report

Filtering with `or`