What is Taskwarrior?

Taskwarrior manages your TODO list from your command line. It is flexible, fast, efficient, unobtrusive, does its job then gets out of your way.

Taskwarrior scales to fit your workflow. Use it as a simple app that captures tasks, shows you the list, and removes tasks from that list. Leverage its capabilities though, and it becomes a sophisticated data query tool that can help you stay organized, and get through your work.

Taskwarrior is an active project, and we fix bugs, improve and add features almost every day.

Why Choose Taskwarrior?

Five good reasons to use Taskwarrior

  1. Are you a command line user looking for an unobtrusive, fast, efficient, flexible tool to let you easily manage your task lists? Taskwarrior is low-friction by design, allowing you to capture the details, and get right back to work.

    $ task add Prepare the first draft of the proposal due:friday

    Taskwarrior uses a natural and expressive command line syntax.

  2. Taskwarrior is methodology-neutral. Whether you follow GTD, use the Pomodoro technique, or just do whatever works for you, Taskwarrior provides capabilities to help you, not restrict you.

  3. Taskwarrior has an active and friendly community, providing support and various forms of help to new and experienced users. Start here for a list of support options. Need an immediate answer - check your man pages and online docs. Need to ask someone a question? Checkout our Discord Server.

  4. Taskwarrior is open in as many ways as it can be:

    • It is free and open source, using the MIT license
    • It uses SQLite database files for storage, which are easily readable. Direct modification is possible but not recommended due to internal consistency requirements.
    • It imports and exports JSON, so your data is never held captive
    • There is DOM access and a Hook script API
    • There are many available free and open extension scripts
    • There is Vit, a curses-based UI
    • There is BugWarrior, so you can import your bug issues from a dozen different bug systems

  5. Taskwarrior is an active, vibrant project. In the last year, it has averaged 5.58 changes per day. Taskwarrior enjoys lively participation from many contributors, with currently over 60 providers of code patches. But there are even more contributors (252 of them) helping out with documentation, bugs, support, ideas, requests and extensions. It’s just going to keep getting better.

A Quick Demonstration

Let’s see Taskwarrior in action. We’ll first add a few tasks to our list.

$ task add Buy milk
Created task 1.

$ task add Buy eggs
Created task 2.

$ task add Bake cake
Created task 3.

Now let’s see the list.

$ task list

ID Description
-- -----------
1  Buy milk
2  Buy eggs
3  Bake cake

3 tasks.

Suppose we bought our ingredients and wish to mark the first two tasks as done.

$ task 1 done
$ task 2 done
$ task list

ID Description
-- -----------
1  Bake cake

1 task.

Those are the first three features, the add, list and done commands, but they represent all you really need to know, to get started with Taskwarrior.

But there are hundreds of other features, so if you learn more, you can do more. It’s entirely up to you to choose how you use Taskwarrior: stick to the simple three commands above, or learn about sophisticated filtering, custom reports, user-defined metadata, color rules, hook scripts, syncing and many more.

Get your copy

There are several ways for you to get a copy of Taskwarrior:

  • Install a binary package. Your operating system probably already has a binary package available. These packages are usually named ’task'.
  • Download a release tarball, from here, then make sure you have libuuid-dev (maybe called uuid-dev) installed. Then using cmake, GCC 4.7 / Clang 3.3, build Taskwarrior.
  • Using git, clone the code repository, switch to the current development branch, and build Taskwarrior.

What’s next?

Probably the most important next step is to simply start using Taskwarrior. Capture your tasks, don’t try to remember them. Review your task list to keep it current. Consult your task list to guide your actions. Develop the habit.

It doesn’t take long until you realize that you might want to modify your workflow. Perhaps you are missing due dates, and need more defined deadlines. Perhaps you need to make greater use of tags to help you filter tasks differently. You’ll know if your workflow is not really helping you as much as it could.

This is when you might look closer at the docs and the recommended Best Practices.

Welcome to Taskwarrior.