Distributed Flatfile Task App Stack

I’ve been using an interesting Android task app for a couple of months now called Simpletask (Source) [not pictured above] and I feel like I’ve used it long enough now to be able to give it a fair review over some of the other stuff I have tried for task management.

I’m still using a lot of other task management apps for things like software development and project planning, but Simpletask and the ecosystem it’s based on have some unique characteristics and advantages that can also potentially fit really well into your workflow.

So far I’ve only talked about Simpletask, but the project it’s based on is called Todo.txt. Todo.txt is a text based task management ecosystem that uses a plain file with each line containing your todo tasks in a specific format.

You can read more about the on the whys and hows of todo.txt from the official primer from which the above image was taken, but they also produce their own app for android called Todo.txt Android and a cli, Todo.sh

The openness of the Todo.sh format allows clients to add their own extensions such as hide before dates and weights and the todo.sh cli has a rich plugin library which allows you to do things such as setup recurring tasks via your cronsystem.

To tie everything together in my stack, I’ve been using a distributed file synchronization system called syncthing (Source) but there are other options available for people who might need dropbox support like iOS users.

If you are developer minded, Todo.txt can be the basic daily todo system that takes you almost anywhere you need to go and if you aren’t a developer, there is a wide variety of stuff already assembled that provide a self-hosted and future proof setup.