Back, back to TaskPaper

Posted by MadaboutDana
Jan 30, 2017 at 12:36 PM

Ah, call me Mr Changeable, but after an increasingly frustrating time spent in efforts to turn Bear and Outlinely into full-scale task managers, I’ve gone back to TaskPaper again.

The latest version 3 is, of course, a very powerful outliner.

But better still, it allows you to build and save searches in its left-hand navigation bar (which also acts as a top-level outline).

The function is not immediately obvious, because it’s not described in the user guide. But if you right-click on “Searches” in the navbar, a little context menu springs up, allowing you to create new ones. The syntax for these *is* detailed in the user guide, fortunately, and you can put all kinds of powerful searches together very easily.

Combine this with the various highlights, formatting options and so on available in the .less style files, and you can build your very own task management app that keeps a close eye on stuff you’re doing, about to do or have scheduled for any number of days ahead, lighting stuff up as it becomes immediately relevant (my @today and @urgent tags both colour to-do items red, for example, whereas my @waiting tag colours them grey).

Sadly, TaskPaper is not available on iOS, and the various clones have not seen any further development since 2015. But fear not: Editorial has excellent support for much TaskPaper functionality, although it’s not the perfect answer - I use it via Dropbox. Let’s hope Jean-Pierre eventually gets round to producing an iOS app!

So far, with my modifications to the various files included, TaskPaper is turning out to be much more powerful than I realised it was. And much more suitable for managing tasks than the excellent but less specialised Bear and Outlinely. I’m henceforth reserving them for the almost equally honourable post of joint Notetaker in Chief.

Cheers,
Bill