Things To Do

The blog’s been a bit Presentation Remote-heavy recently, so here’s something different.

In a few recent post, I’ve mentioned the to-do list. The list in question is kept in Things, by Cultured Code, which, as well as having a pleasingly vague name, has recently jumped in usefulness because they’ve brought out an iPhone version that syncs to the desktop. This Is A Good Thing1.

Sometimes, though, I want to get at my to-do items from the command-line. To this end, I knocked together a short script called ThingsToDo.py, which allows you to do just that. Run it, and all your to-do items are listed, sorted by project. You can also apply various filters (eg only show items that haven’t been completed, or with a particular tag) and there are a couple of output options as well, and of course you can script it or pipe the results into other tools.

It’s not “fully-featured” (eg it doesn’t show due dates, or understand Things’ “focus” or “areas of responsibility”), and of course it’s completely unsupported and without warranty of any kind – but it’s free, and nifty, if you’re a command-line sorta person.