devtodo: Much to do, about something

I remember devtodo from a long time ago, and I’ll be honest, my opinion on it hasn’t changed too much.

It’s quick and speedy, but I still prefer applications that make use of space, or offer a proper interface.

I know that’s my prejudice and so I try my best to quell it when I suspect it is muddying the waters of perception.

And I do like the color schemes at work here. And it does offer a few interactive moments, such as you can see in the screenshot.

One small confession though: Occasionally I find tools like this to be actually more cumbersome than something with an interface.

Just as an example, I would probably rely on ctodo before devtodo, just because typing out long task descriptions and priorities at the bash prompt is not appealing to me.

I would much prefer to arrange things visually, and see things in organized layouts.

That might sound odd — particularly coming from me — but that’s how I like to do business. 😉

ctodo: See what you have to do

I mentioned ikog last week, but that’s hardly the only to-do list manager on the market.

And where ikog relies on a menu and text entry to navigate, ctodo is a lot more simple, and a lot more intuitive.

With just enough on-screen prompts to forego the need for a help screen, I am confident that you’ll have ctodo up and running within a minute of installing it.

A couple of tips, just because I’m a nice person. … When you edit titles, or name a new item, your backspace key might not work. On my system, I needed to use the left arrow key and delete keys to touch up a few entries.

Second, ctodo will accept the name of a file as an argument. Which means, you can keep two or three distinct lists (be they to-do lists or what have you) and use ctodo to manage them all.

Lastly, I like that ctodo saves to standard text files, with the contents being … identical to what you see in ctodo’s display. So you can conceivably edit ctodo’s lists outside of ctodo, and preserve compatibility.

So there you have it. For a simple, easy-to-manage interface and good design overall, ctodo gets a gold smiley. 😀

ikog: An extensive to-do list

I am not sure why, but to-do lists seem to be among the chores most often relegated to the console.

There are literally dozens of to-do applications available, each with its own style and a varying depth of intricacy.

ikog is one of those dozens, and is among the smaller subset that arranges itself with menus and commands.

Most of the controls and actions have keyboard shortcuts and abbreviations that can trim down the time it usually takes to work a command-driven application.

And if you find it all a little intimidating at first, a simple “help” will give you a rundown of available commands.

More impressive though, is the extensive operation manual available among the source files.

Personally I still prefer hnb for to-do lists, but that’s mostly because I use it for several different things at once.

If you prefer something more powerful, give ikog a try.