It’s funny how this works… Right after submitting this I stumbled upon Vikunja. https://vikunja.io/

It looks good, at a glance. Anyone with experience using it?

I’ve taken a brief look at it. The ui is fairly slick, but you have to use it their way and it doesn’t have a cli. How much that matters is up to you.

vikunja.io/docs/cli/ Also it supports webdav so you can use it however you like.

Thats an administration cli, not a daily use cli.

And, I mean things like being able to take tasks, pipe them through whatever tooling you like, pipe them back in, sync them from any other task system, etc. TaskWarrior has a fully customizable priority and urgency system, tagging, dependency management, and status system. I also like that TaskWarrior is usable completely offline and then can be resynced whenever you feel like it.

Vikunja is great and probably the right choice for most people. But if you do significant project planning for yourself AND want to be able to deal with you todo list programmatically, the only other thing close is orgmode.

vikunja.io/docs/veans/

From TFA, emphasis mine:

What veans is for#

Coding agents keep their own to-do lists. Claude Code has TodoWrite, other tools have their own scratch files, and either way that list lives inside a single session and disappears when the session ends. You can’t see it while the agent is working, your teammates can’t see it at all, and nothing survives to the next session.

veans replaces that ephemeral list with real tasks in a Vikunja project. The agent claims a task before it starts, moves it along as it works, and leaves it in review when it’s done. The result is that the agent’s work is visible in the same place you already track everything else: you can watch a task move across the board in real time, comment on it, reprioritize it, or pick up where the agent left off. When the session ends, the trail is still there.

veans itself is built for machines, not people . Everything prints JSON, so it’s made to be consumed by an agent or a script. The human side of the workflow happens in Vikunja.

What Taskwarrior lets you do is something like this for people:

task add priority:high due:thursday depends:32 something I need to do
task ready   # shows all of my tasks that aren't waiting on something or depending on something
task project:home-repairs export > home-repairs.json # export my entire home repair project to a json file to process into a gantt chart, budget (since I can add a price tag to each task) and whatever else

but then I can also have a script that looks like:

# taskfile.sh
infile="$1"
proj ="$2"

while IFS= read -r line; do
    [ -z "$line" ] && continue
    [[ "$line" =~ ^[[:space:]]*# ]] && continue
    echo "Adding task: $line"
    if [ -n "$proj" ]; then
        task add "$line" "$proj"
    else
        task add "$line"
    fi
done < "$input_file"

which lets me have preset task lists for various things, like:

taskfile.sh ~/tasks/packing-list.txt proj:work-trip
taskfile.sh ~/tasks/xmas-list.txt proj:xmas-presents

I use it daily. I like it a lot. I’ve hooked my voice home assistant into it to create tasks. The Android app is alright. I have some problems with the widget not updating properly, but I think that was my fault for not turning on automatic sync.

The docker setup was trivial.

Use the tasks.org app and webdav to connect to vikunja. Works really well.

I love it. Use it for shared shopping list with my wife.

I’ve used planify before but not extensively. I mostly track tasks in Obsidian.

Nextcloud and Jtxboard

Instead of new and exciting, how about old and boring? https://taskwarrior.org Sync server is self hosted, it’s more configurable and programmable than anything else and has a variety of front ends on different platforms.

Thanks but CLI only is a deal breaker for me.

Fair enough! The lack of a cli is the deal breaker for Vikunja for me.

There is a WASM ticket being worked on that once it is completed will allow for all sorts of fancy web UIs for TaskWarrior as standalone PWAs or whatever. I should check in on how that’s going.

For todo I use my Radicale instance and Tasks.org as my mobile client. It’s all treated as CalDAV which I was already using so it’s convenient

This one.

You can setup recurring tasks, tasks that speak to you, tags, multiple reminders (good for birthdays: next month / week / today)

And locations (although I’ve not tried that yet)

This may not qualify since its technically a notes app I guess, but I do use it also for to do lists: github.com/ZhFahim/anchor

Thanks, I had not heard of that before. The UI looks really nice but I don’t see the same flexible list making that I am looking for. I will check this out if nothing else comes along.

I stuck with superproductivity. It supperts boards (you can configure your own board, but kanban and eisenhower are build in i think (i dont use that feature) i like how they handle projects and task storage. They have a philosophy of not adding task from a project to the daily clutter, you chose yourself. If helps to not feel overwhelmed and it can store tasks.

Its not that good for lists of things imo, its better for for timetracking. But you can create a task and easily do subtasks and use it as a list. Also I think it is installable via docker but I don’t know, I havent used docker, but a search gave some results.

+1 for SP. Started using it recently. It’s okay. Beat out other ones I was considering. Not blown away, but functional. Can sync it using webdav.

Obsidian ain’t that bad, its pretty overkill and not exactly open source but it is nice when I’m using syncthing with it and have access to community plugins, I just noticed recently umbrel even added a obsidian app to their store so self hosting it doesn’t seem like a crazy issue to me idk about if self.st has obsidian on it or not but its an option at least.

I’ve been self hosting usememos.com for the past 6 months on my Tailnet and its been working great without issues

Oh! I love my Memos app for general note taking but for making lists that I can find / add to / prune quickly, I’ve had less luck with it. I am probably just stuck in my ways but I’m going to keep looking. Thanks anyway.

I’m sorry but this is kind of a wtf to me. What’s wrong with a text file? I thought I was being fancy by using org mode, which is just a text file with some markup. If you want to be really fancy you could use a bug tracker. fossil-scm.org has a built in one that I might try sometime.

Maybe people aren’t all the same and some people like this gs to look nice, be organised in certain ways, be able to synch, check things off with a click of a button. Nothing is wrong with a text file. I use Sublime Text often times, but not everyone is the same.

Nothig is wrong with a textfile if it works for you. The todo-list apps and time tracking apps just offer easily accessable features like projects, tags, subtasks, maybe some sync festures and import features from some calender or something. So you don’t have to build a system to organize your stuff yourself.

I went through a few and have landed on Jotty Page

I was afraid when I saw this

that it was just slopware, but it seems like it only has a few commits by Claude. And the commits aren’t just a firehose, like slopware tends to be.

I use Nextcloud Deck. It’s amazing.

I have been looking for a good to-do ecosystem for so long that I ended up with pen and paper. Hear me out. I bought very nice a6 paper notebook and very comfortable ball pen an I just enjoy having this one non-digital, offline thing. After years of not writing with pen and doing most of my life management digitally, having this one thing this way… It’s hard to explain but I enjoy. I even try to write with nice joined-up writing, because it’s not like in school when I had to write a lot fast. No, every to-do is a few words or a sentence and thus I can take time and write nicely. At the beginning of the notebook I have next todos section, in the middle I have in progress long term todos and at the back I have inbox.

Where do you keep them? They’re always in your pocket?

Not really, I have them home at my desk. When I have something I need to add when I am not home I usually add it to the self-message on Signal which I basically use as inbox for all sorts of ideas anyway.

… add it to the self-message on Signal which I basically use as inbox for all sorts of ideas anyway.

What a genius idea. I just setup a “self” group for this. Thanks!

I think Signal has this by default. It’s called “note to self”. So not really my idea 😀

Last year, I gave up in shared online (non-goog) calendars with my partner. We just use a wall calendar again, like we did many years ago, and it “just works”. So I get you.

But I’m curious how you maintain an always changing list of to-dos in your notebook. That sounds… messy maybe?

I’ll have to go see if there’s some way people organize that these days.

Oh yeah, we also have a wall calendar with my wife. But personally I use digital calendar.

Its not as messy for me, but took time to come up with something that works for me. The three categories are intentional. “Next” are basically simple tasks that can be done at once (but take more than a few mins), added after planning, so that doesn’t really change once they are added (and I just tick what is done). In progress, pretty similar, but longer term tasks (maybe not perfect name for the category). I usually keep a section under the task based on how much I expect sub-tasks or notes. And inbox, well its just add all, plan later list. When something moves to next or in progress or is done immediately I just tick it in inbox. In inbox I have 3 types of tick-boxes. Square ones - if I expect a task to be doable fast without moving it anywhere (in GTD those are the under 2 minutes tasks). Then round one for tasks that need to be added to next. And triangle for tasks that will be longer-term tasks and need to be added to the in-progress section once I decide to do them.

I use Logseq for work/computer stuff, Markor on my android phone for personal stuff