Taskwarrior

Linux Format, the UK's biggest selling Linux magazine, has a HotPicks section,
where they look at the greatest new and updated open source software
-- and the best of the bunch wins the Hottest Pick award.

In issue 124, November 2009, Task received the award!

After lots of development and three beta releases, Task 1.9.0 is released! Download task from:

http://taskwarrior.org

In task 1.9.0, you will find many improvements, including:

Color
- 256-color support, for more interesting and subtle color control.
- Color 'blending' which is the mixing of foreground and background colors for when multiple color rules apply.
- Alternating line coloration.
- Color rules now match on partial project names, like filters.
- The 'color' command now allows you to test various color combinations ("task color red on rgb315")

Calendar
- Calendar report can now list due tasks beneath the calendar.
- Holidays can now be marked on the calendar.

Configuration
- New 'config' command to modify your .taskrc file, report on the current configuration, and check your .taskrc file for problems.
- Ability to nest configuration files with the "include" keyword.
- More data format options, including the ability to control date format by report.
- More control over the display of annotations.
- Ability to include the date and time on certain fields.
- New 'countdown' report column showing time until task is due.
- Several other new report columns.
- More control over calendar colors.
- Ability to color tasks due today differently, to make them stand out.
- Configurable case-sensitivity for searches, subsitutions.
- Configurable tag-, recurrence- and active-indicators.

Documentation
- New task-faq man page.
- New task-color man page explaining color usage.
- Updates to all man pages.

Filters
- New 'word' and 'noword' attribute modifiers.

Miscellaneous
- More vim syntax highlighting of task data files and configuration files.
- Lots of bug fixes, and a huge increase in the size of the test suite, for improved quality.

Task is now a standard part of Debian, Fedora and Cygwin.  Packages are available for OS X, Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, RedHat/CentOS, as well as source packages. Please check the NEWS file for the full list of supported distributions/operating systems.

You can see the full list of changes in the ChangeLog file, or online, and don't forget to look in on http://taskwarrior.org for news and updates.

Thank you for all your help and feedback.

See http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/task for more details. Thank you, Alexander, for sponsoring the upload..

Please participate in the last beta testing of task 1.9.0 and download beta 3. Help us improve the quality of the release. The source tar ball plus packages for Ubuntu, Fedora and OS X can be found on the Download page

Task 1.9.0.beta2 will not build on a fully patched Cygwin 1.7. This will be addressed in a beta3 build, shortly.

Cygwin 1.7 has relocated the ncurses include files, and in doing so, invalidated an already-poor assumption about the location. Beta3 will have more sophisticated library detection, and will allow specific overrides for library locations.

We got some feedback from users that resulted in a couple of fixes. Get the new beta 2 from the Download page.

Source code tar balls and binary packages are available via the Download page. Take a closer look at the Changelog for details on the new features.

This means 1.9.0 has all the features it's going to have - it just needs a decent beta period to find any bugs. Look for a release in February.

We start showing a default task cal and task list command in version 1.8.5:

The only change that was to set the dateformat variable to Y-M-D.which is used by the list report.

We continue with the first teaser screenshot of 1.9.0:

You can already see a difference in the calendar. It supports now custom coloring of the current day (today), tasks that are due or overdue, the weekend days, the weeknumbers and holidays. We will later see some changes for the list report.

Let's see how holidays are handled in the calendar:

Displaying holidays in the calendar is handled by the calendar.holidays configuration variable. Set to none no holidays are marked up in the calendar. When set to sparse the corresponding days will be colorized in the calendar. The color is controled with the color.calendar.holiday variable. When set to full the details for the holidays within the calendar range are displayed after the calendar. The information for the holidays is stored in 2 configuration variables for each holiday: holiday.X.name and holiday.X.date. You can store them in an extra file and include it in the .taskrc file with the new include directive.

In our third screenshot the control of the output of annotations is shown:

By using report.X.annotations one can limit the output of annotations to just the last one with sparse. Or disable the output of annotations completely with none. Instead the description of the task will be prefixed with a + sign.

The reports have now their own dateformat to display the due date of tasks in a different format than the input dateformat. By using report.X.dateformat you can include the weekday, weeknumber or the month name in the corresponding due date column:

The new report.X.dateformat is also used when enabling the calendar.details which similar to calendar.holidays appends a report of tasks with due dates in the calendar range to the calendar. Note how calendar.details is set to full.

Interested in saving estate in the terminal? Turn off the calendar legend by setting calendar.legend to off or no.

Task 1.9.0 is currently in Beta -- see the Download page for details.

Task 1.8.5 has a new OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard) package that properly installs the man pages, various documents, shell completion scripts, and Vim scripts. Prior OSX packages contained only the task program itself, a license and and a README. This install is recommended for OSX 10.6 users - those man pages are useful!