list
The list report is a customizable report, which means that many aspects of the report is configurable.
You may override any of these aspects by modifying the Taskwarrior configuration.
The definition of the list report can be shown using the show command like this:
$ task show report.list
Config Variable Value
----------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------
report.list.columns id,start.age,entry.age,depends.indicator,priority,project,
tags,recur.indicator,scheduled.countdown,due,until.age,
description.count,urgency
report.list.description Most details of tasks
report.list.filter status:pending
report.list.labels ID,Active,Age,D,P,Project,Tags,R,Sch,Due,Until,Description,Urg
report.list.sort start-,due+,project+/,urgency-
These are five settings that define the report. The description and labels are straightforward text.
Columns
The columns are the task metadata, with optional format specifiers.
For example, the description.count column means the description column, but not the annotations; instead show a count of the annotations, if any.
You can see the supported columns and formats using the columns command.
Filter
The filter is automatically applied when you run this report.
In this case the filter shows only pending tasks, using status:pending. This can cause some confusion, because if you were to run this command:
$ task status:completed list
Then the filter status:pending, when combined with the command line filter status:completed defines two non-intersecting sets and no result is shown.
This is because filter terms are assumed to be combined with and operators, unless otherwise specified.
Instead, to see completed tasks, you would need to use a report that does not filter on status, and the all report does just that, so you get the expected results by running:
$ task status:completed all
Sort
The sort setting is a list of columns, with an optional direction (ascending or descending), and an optional break indicator. A sort column need not be one that is included in the report.
There are four sort keys, which are applied in order, so the report is sorted by start date, then due date, then project, then urgency. From the example, one the third sort key is:
project+/
Breaking this down, it means the project attribute is sorted in ascending collating sequence (hence the +), and the solidus (/) indicates that this is a break column, which means a blank line is inserted before every unique value.
Configuration
There is a configuration option, named print.empty.columns, which defaults to off.
This means that if a report has a column where no task shown has a value, then do not display this empty column.
This results in much narrower reports.
The list report has thirteen columns, but due to this setting, it is rare to see more than six or seven columns in the output.