tdl: A task organizer in its own right

These days, it seems I’m either looking at to-do organizers or tcp doodads. My hope is that somewhere in the next 85 posts or so, something a little different will come along. At least before the U section. 😐

Not this time though. tdl is another task organizer, and this time it’s not built off taskwarrior.

Over the past year and a half it has become clear that, of task managers that are not fullscreen applications, the trend is either to perform every operation as a single command — like taskwarrior, for example — or to enter an interactive mode and handle all management in a captive terminal — like yokadi, for example.

tdl seems comfortable in either mode, giving you the chance to send off single-shot changes to your to-do list, or to settle in and make serious changes.

And tdl is no joke. It can set priorities, generate reports of done tasks, search through tasks for specific strings, undo changes, revert from an unsaved series of changes, postpone or defer tasks … it’s quite impressive.

I’d even go so far as to say it might rival taskwarrior and some other organizer suites in its complexity. Just moving through the man page took me quite a while.

tdl seems very much under-the-radar, but that may just be the side effect of my relative inexperience with it. It’s probably worth noting though, that the home page shows no changes within the past few years.

So it might be that it’s so far under the radar that it’s gone invisible. But that wouldn’t intimidate me. I’m quite used to using software that’s been out of development for decades. 😉