30-Second Tutorial

Let’s get started. Here’s a quick demonstration showing how to perform basic task management.

Here is an explanation of what is happening. First add two tasks.

$ task add Read Taskwarrior documents later
Created task 1.

$ task add priority:H Pay bills
Created task 2.

Easy. Do you see that second one has a High priority? Now look at those tasks, using the report next. Notice that the two tasks are ordered by urgency, and the urgency is affected by the priority, among other things.

$ task next

ID Age P Description                      Urg
-- --- - -------------------------------- ----
 2 10s H Pay bills                           6
 1 20s   Read Taskwarrior documents later    0

Suppose the bills are paid, and we wish to mark task 2 as completed.

$ task 2 done
Completed task 2 'Pay bills'.
Completed 1 task.

Now we can omit the next command, because it is the default command.

$ task

ID Age Description                      Urg
-- --- -------------------------------- ----
 1 5m  Read Taskwarrior documents later    0

Task 2 is now gone. Notice that no visible tasks have a priority set, and so the priority column is not shown. Now we can delete that remaining task, because we are already using the tutorial.

$ task 1 delete
Permanently delete task 1 'Read Taskwarrior documents later'? (yes/no) y
Deleting task 1 'Read Taskwarrior documents later'.
Deleted 1 task.

$ task
No matches.

That is all you need to know. These four commands (add, done, delete, next) will allow you to use Taskwarrior effectively. If you are new to Taskwarrior, it is recommended that you stop here, go and start to manage your task list for a while. We don’t want you to be overwhelmed at a time when you just need a way to organize and get things done.

When you are comfortable with basic Taskwarrior usage, there are many other features you can learn about. While you are not expected to learn all of them, or even find them useful, you might just find exactly what you need.