Back, back to TaskPaper

Posted by MadaboutDana
Jan 31, 2017 at 10:33 PM

You’re right, Paul - you’ve quite cheered me up! CRIMPing lives!

Oh yeah, Jesse. Whoops.

Mind you, TaskPaper is vastly improved over its earlier incarnations. I’m actually very impressed by how easy it is to track down specific tasks. I’ve tried all kinds of outlining solutions; the closest equivalent is probably Todoist, but TaskPaper is much easier to use for rapid input, and is actually much easier to quickly reconfigure (your “projects” appear as the folding outline in the left-hand navigation bar, and you can create/delete them very easily, as well as drag them around to reposition them). The archiving function is very convenient now that it automatically assigns the host project to each completed task. And the handling of dates and other variables is seriously impressive - it’s now possible to put together highly sophisticated filters that can be used either spontaneously, in searches, or saved into the “Searches” section on the navbar, or you can simply click on tags to find all related entries (shown in their hierarchies - such a simple concept, but something many, many other apps don’t do, or don’t do well. Outlinely, I’m looking at you…).

TaskPaper’s stability is also much, much better. If you complete a task and archive it, all subtasks and notes are automatically moved with it (this was somewhat dodgy in earlier iterations). You can add and edit tasks even when you’re looking at a filtered list, which makes high-speed task management much much easier.

The contrast between this text-based approach and the database approach of other task management apps (I think of something like OmniFocus, for example, with all its tiny little fields and buttons) is very dramatic, especially in terms of sheer speed and convenience. No, TaskPaper can’t really be shared (or not without creating lots of conflicting files!), but as a task and even project management app it’s extremely powerful.

Now all it really needs is support for basic Markdown, and maybe a simple date sorting function for filters, and it would be pretty much perfect!

@jaslar: you’re thinking of the very good TaskMator, but alas, the latter hasn’t been updated since 2015, so hasn’t kept pace with more recent TaskPaper developments such as folding. Editorial does fold, and also allows you to assign colours to tags, which means it’s the closest thing to the desktop TaskPaper currently available. But it doesn’t handle tags very well; you’d have to write your own workflow to build any complex search functions. There I do draw the line! Well, for the time being, until some impulsive bout of CRIMPing suddenly overcomes me.