This is relating to using todo.txt format to manage todos, which I’ve been using for a few years now.

For the uninitiated, todo.txt is a simple format for managing todos. Its just a textfile, and each line is a task.

There are lots of more tags/contexts/priorities you can add, but I tend to only use priority and about half of the time add one project tag.

Following some version of the plaintext productivity philosophy, I split my todos into multiple files.

”My to-do list is only going to contain tasks I plan to do in the near future”

My main todo.txt are only things that if I have free time, I can do immediately. They should not be timed gated behind someone else, a date, or anything else.

In the past, I’ve created entirely new config files and a big script to help manage this complexity, but as I’ve added todo-actions (third party commands like @proycons scripts), it gets more annoying to sync configuration changes between multiple files.

To solve this, I create a wrapper todo.txt script which maintains a separate data directory entirely. For more long-term goals/ideas, I create a script called eventually:

#!/bin/sh
export TODO_DIR="${XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR}/Notes/eventually"
exec todo.sh "$@"

That sets the TODO_DIR environment variable. Then, in my ~/.config/todo/config file, I have:

# Your todo.txt directory (this should be an absolute path)
if [[ -z "$TODO_DIR" ]]; then
	export TODO_DIR="${HPIDATA}/todo"  # default if unset
fi

# Your todo/done/report.txt locations
export TODO_FILE="$TODO_DIR/todo.txt"
export DONE_FILE="$TODO_DIR/done.txt"
export REPORT_FILE="$TODO_DIR/report.txt"

The todo.txt configuration file is just a bash script, so it makes it very easy to configure in this way. It also means all of your arguments are passed onto the todo.sh without modification, which could be a source of potentional configuration errors

Ive found this to be the least amount of mental overhead to create a new todo.txt file, which I see as more important than creating some very specific system with filters and tags which I can waste time fiddling with.

Since my ~/Documents/ directory is synced with syncthing, everything is automatically backed up and synced across my devices.

Edit: I’ve since created a script that just generates that tiny file for me, so I can create new lists whenever I want.