Hello,
I'm currently using kGTD as my tool of choice, but a pure text-based solution looks very attracting. I see there are several bundles mentioning GTD and I was wondering what were their differences and if they were all maintained.
Additionally, is someone using one of these bundles and somehow synchronizing their GTD setup to a Palm? If so, I'd be delighted to hear about it.
Thanks a lot,
Alan
-- Alan Schmitt http://alan.petitepomme.net/
The hacker: someone who figured things out and made something cool happen. .O. ..O OOO
Hi Alan, On Oct 16, 2006, at 6:45 AM, Alan Schmitt wrote:
Hello,
I'm currently using kGTD as my tool of choice, but a pure text- based solution looks very attracting. I see there are several bundles mentioning GTD and I was wondering what were their differences and if they were all maintained.
I'll let Mike Mellor talk about GTD and GTD2, I'll focus on GTDAlt which I wrote. I was using kGTD before that, so it is to a large extend influenced by that. In particular, you can have projects and subprojects, and if a project's name starts with an exclamation point, it is permanent, meaning that it does not get marked as completed once all the actions in it are completed. There is also a system similar to the Quicksilver integration, where instead you use quicksilver, with essentially the same syntax as for kGTD, to add actions into a kind of "inbox file". Then from within GTDAlt, you can ask for the inbox file to be processed, and the respective actions are moved to their appropriate projects, or to a temp.gtd file if they have no projects associated with them.
The one thing that doesn't work as well as expected is the "reset/ repeat" functionality that kGTD offered, though if I recall there is something similar (been a while, and I don't use that feature that much).
Most importantly, there is a converter that will take your kGTD file and convert it to the GTDAlt format.
There is limited integration with Remind and iCal. The iCal integration is not very stable yet, though I think a couple of people use it. Improving that is one of my goals for the bundle.
Additionally, is someone using one of these bundles and somehow synchronizing their GTD setup to a Palm? If so, I'd be delighted to hear about it.
I don't have a Palm, so I can't really comment on that. Does this synchronizing go through iCal? In that case, it should be theoretically possible.
Thanks a lot,
You do bring up an important point though, namely this plethora of bundles for essentially the same task. Part of the reason for this is that they all have pretty different workflows. There is some discussion among the developers as to how best resolve the problem that users like yourself face, so any feedback from users of the bundles will be helpful. At the very least, it would be helpful to find out how many people use each of these bundles.
Alan
Haris
On 16 oct. 06, at 13:39, Charilaos Skiadas wrote:
I'll let Mike Mellor talk about GTD and GTD2, I'll focus on GTDAlt which I wrote. I was using kGTD before that, so it is to a large extend influenced by that. In particular, you can have projects and subprojects, and if a project's name starts with an exclamation point, it is permanent, meaning that it does not get marked as completed once all the actions in it are completed. There is also a system similar to the Quicksilver integration, where instead you use quicksilver, with essentially the same syntax as for kGTD, to add actions into a kind of "inbox file". Then from within GTDAlt, you can ask for the inbox file to be processed, and the respective actions are moved to their appropriate projects, or to a temp.gtd file if they have no projects associated with them.
This sounds very nice, I'll have to check it out.
The one thing that doesn't work as well as expected is the "reset/ repeat" functionality that kGTD offered, though if I recall there is something similar (been a while, and I don't use that feature that much).
I use this a bit, but I'm pretty sure this could be done in some other way.
Most importantly, there is a converter that will take your kGTD file and convert it to the GTDAlt format.
Ah this is great. Does it also preserves the archive (as an history of what was done and when)?
There is limited integration with Remind and iCal. The iCal integration is not very stable yet, though I think a couple of people use it. Improving that is one of my goals for the bundle.
Very nice. So it would make integrating with the Palm fairly simple.
Another simple solution would be a way to export the list of tasks to files whose name is the context. This would be sufficient for a read- only integration with the Palm (which is how I use the iCal integration of kGTD today because of some bug that prevents "done" status on the Palm to be propagated back to kGTD).
You do bring up an important point though, namely this plethora of bundles for essentially the same task. Part of the reason for this is that they all have pretty different workflows. There is some discussion among the developers as to how best resolve the problem that users like yourself face, so any feedback from users of the bundles will be helpful. At the very least, it would be helpful to find out how many people use each of these bundles.
Switching GTD systems is never a small matter. The fact that you have a way to import an existing kGTD setup makes your option very appealing. So if I do the switch, I'll definitely report back.
Thanks a lot for your detailed explanation,
Alan
-- Alan Schmitt http://alan.petitepomme.net/
The hacker: someone who figured things out and made something cool happen. .O. ..O OOO
On Oct 16, 2006, at 9:33 AM, Alan Schmitt wrote:
Most importantly, there is a converter that will take your kGTD file and convert it to the GTDAlt format.
Ah this is great. Does it also preserves the archive (as an history of what was done and when)?
No, but that is an interesting idea. I already traverse the entire XML tree, so it should be possible to work on the archive part as well. I'll see if I can incorporate it as some point in the future, though right now I am swamped with other things.
There is limited integration with Remind and iCal. The iCal integration is not very stable yet, though I think a couple of people use it. Improving that is one of my goals for the bundle.
Very nice. So it would make integrating with the Palm fairly simple.
Another simple solution would be a way to export the list of tasks to files whose name is the context. This would be sufficient for a read-only integration with the Palm (which is how I use the iCal integration of kGTD today because of some bug that prevents "done" status on the Palm to be propagated back to kGTD).
I have a script that I use to obtain all actions with given context, and then show these using GeekTool. For now I have not made it public because it's a bit rough on the ends, but I'll see if I can polish it and make it available. One could then use this to create those files.
With the limited testing that I have done, changes in iCal will propagate back to GTDAlt, though this is definitely one of the not 100% reliable areas of the system atm.
Haris
On 16 oct. 06, at 16:11, Charilaos Skiadas wrote:
Ah this is great. Does it also preserves the archive (as an history of what was done and when)?
No, but that is an interesting idea. I already traverse the entire XML tree, so it should be possible to work on the archive part as well. I'll see if I can incorporate it as some point in the future, though right now I am swamped with other things.
Another simple solution would be a way to export the list of tasks to files whose name is the context. This would be sufficient for a read-only integration with the Palm (which is how I use the iCal integration of kGTD today because of some bug that prevents "done" status on the Palm to be propagated back to kGTD).
I have a script that I use to obtain all actions with given context, and then show these using GeekTool. For now I have not made it public because it's a bit rough on the ends, but I'll see if I can polish it and make it available. One could then use this to create those files.
With the limited testing that I have done, changes in iCal will propagate back to GTDAlt, though this is definitely one of the not 100% reliable areas of the system atm.
Thanks a lot, I'll follow this closely then.
Alan
-- Alan Schmitt http://alan.petitepomme.net/
The hacker: someone who figured things out and made something cool happen. .O. ..O OOO
Because of the kGTD importer, I decided to try GTDAlt first, and here is some quick feedback.
First of all, I like being able to do this in TextMate, it feels really nice.
On 16 oct. 06, at 16:11, Charilaos Skiadas wrote:
I have a script that I use to obtain all actions with given context, and then show these using GeekTool. For now I have not made it public because it's a bit rough on the ends, but I'll see if I can polish it and make it available. One could then use this to create those files.
I would really like to try this script.
I found one bug: the "Go to project" does not seem to do anything.
Here are some features I would like (sorry if they already exist and I missed them): - an easy way to move a project to another file (it's quite simple if it has no notes, but it can get involved with notes: it needs to be fetched, and maybe renumbered if a note already exists with this number) - a way to clean up done tasks (this would involve: finding them, copying them in a completed.gtd file (configurable), and somehow keeping the information about them (the best would be to recreate the project structure if it does not exist, and append to the project structure if it exists, ordered by completion date))
One thing I want to do on my side is try to integrate my Tickler text based system (there is a quick description [here](http:// alan.petitepomme.net/blog/files/ 5e244cd20a732b57b13144d73e25ed0f-48.html), but it has evolved a bit since to display the pending ticklers using GeekTools) so that what gets out of it is automatically sent to the GTDAlt inbox (which I haven't used yet).
Thanks,
Alan
-- Alan Schmitt http://alan.petitepomme.net/
The hacker: someone who figured things out and made something cool happen. .O. ..O OOO
On Oct 19, 2006, at 8:30 AM, Alan Schmitt wrote:
- an easy way to move a project to another file (it's quite simple
if it has no notes, but it can get involved with notes: it needs to be fetched, and maybe renumbered if a note already exists with this number)
Yes, this is a major todo.
- a way to clean up done tasks (this would involve: finding them,
copying them in a completed.gtd file (configurable), and somehow keeping the information about them (the best would be to recreate the project structure if it does not exist, and append to the project structure if it exists, ordered by completion date))
This sort of exists, though you have to call it for each file individually atm. Look under Action -> Archive Completed. It puts things in a gtdlog file.
Haris
On 19 oct. 06, at 15:52, Charilaos Skiadas wrote:
- a way to clean up done tasks (this would involve: finding them,
copying them in a completed.gtd file (configurable), and somehow keeping the information about them (the best would be to recreate the project structure if it does not exist, and append to the project structure if it exists, ordered by completion date))
This sort of exists, though you have to call it for each file individually atm. Look under Action -> Archive Completed. It puts things in a gtdlog file.
Ah, very nice. There is only one small caveat: in the case of the sub project of a project, one only sees the project.
Does it preserve the notes?
Thanks a lot,
Alan
-- Alan Schmitt http://alan.petitepomme.net/
The hacker: someone who figured things out and made something cool happen. .O. ..O OOO
On Oct 19, 2006, at 11:02 AM, Alan Schmitt wrote:
Ah, very nice. There is only one small caveat: in the case of the sub project of a project, one only sees the project.
Does it preserve the notes?
Yeah as it stands it only preserves the project and the action name, no notes. It is meant to be a list of things you have done. The note was there to help you get them done, so it's not needed any more. At least that would be one rationale.
I guess it's a question of how lean the gtdlog should be. Alan Schussman actually implemented that, if I recall correctly, so maybe he can pitch in with his views. I lean toward having it as minimalist as possible, but that's just my take on it. I can see the advantages to a "full-blown archive". Perhaps an environment option could handle that.
Thanks a lot,
Alan
Haris
On 19 oct. 06, at 17:54, Charilaos Skiadas wrote:
Yeah as it stands it only preserves the project and the action name, no notes. It is meant to be a list of things you have done. The note was there to help you get them done, so it's not needed any more. At least that would be one rationale.
I understand this perfectly, I was just wondering (kGTD also erases the notes upon completion).
About the environment variables: do they have to live in the main preference pane, or can I put them in a .textmate_init in the project folder? I just tried the later, and even though an "echo $TM_GTD_CONTEXT" returns the correct contexts when I ctrl-R, it does not seem they are taken into account.
Thanks,
Alan
-- Alan Schmitt http://alan.petitepomme.net/
The hacker: someone who figured things out and made something cool happen. .O. ..O OOO
On Oct 19, 2006, at 8:54 AM, Charilaos Skiadas wrote:
I guess it's a question of how lean the gtdlog should be. Alan Schussman actually implemented that, if I recall correctly, so maybe he can pitch in with his views. I lean toward having it as minimalist as possible, but that's just my take on it. I can see the advantages to a "full-blown archive". Perhaps an environment option could handle that.
-blinks- I did? Since the cleanup command also removes notes that are linked to a task, it seems like it ought not be too difficult to append the note below the logged entry for posterity -- perhaps activated by an options flag to save notes with archived tasks. My thinking about the log was that if it was as simple as possible, it could then be parsed in all sorts of ways. (For the review command, for example; I also worked for a while on using it as a way to log time in and out of tasks/projects, as well, but never really got it very functional.) In the interest of keeping the log relatively simple, but allowing for the keeping of project information, I wonder if parent projects couldn't just be added to the log line, separated by more slashes. So if "revisions" was a subproject of "chapter", then we'd get this:
/2006-08-10/MacArthur chapter/Revisions/@mac fix tables/graphs
A bundle command could be used to scan the log and reconstruct the project and display it in its original form, for review or whatever purpose, perhaps.
Just brainstorming. I have to note that actually doing any of this is way beyond me, right now, as I'm deep in dissertation-land and don't expect to see my own shadow for a while.
-Alan
On 19 oct. 06, at 23:10, Alan Schussman wrote:
In the interest of keeping the log relatively simple, but allowing for the keeping of project information, I wonder if parent projects couldn't just be added to the log line, separated by more slashes. So if "revisions" was a subproject of "chapter", then we'd get this:
/2006-08-10/MacArthur chapter/Revisions/@mac fix tables/graphs
This would be great, I'm basically doing it manually at the moment.
A bundle command could be used to scan the log and reconstruct the project and display it in its original form, for review or whatever purpose, perhaps.
This could be nice as well for recurring projects.
Just brainstorming. I have to note that actually doing any of this is way beyond me, right now, as I'm deep in dissertation-land and don't expect to see my own shadow for a while.
Good luck, I've been there and I know how it feels. And I guess at some points I should just dive in the bundle and discover how things work.
By the way, are ".gtd" files indexed by SpotLight, or do I need to add an importer for them?
Thanks,
Alan
-- Alan Schmitt http://alan.petitepomme.net/
The hacker: someone who figured things out and made something cool happen. .O. ..O OOO
Alan,
Mike Mellor should probably respond on behalf of GTD/GTD2, but sometimes he doesn't get to the list until later, so I can help out a little.
GTD2 is the new, currently non-working, version of the GTD bundle. It's adding the ability to change an action item's "state" from undone to waiting, undone, or other designation.
You can read about the original GTD bundle here: http://panalaska.org/geek/?p=43 and here: http://www.panalaska.org/GTD_Stuff/GTD_Intro_Revised.html (though note that exclusions.gtd should be excluded.gtd)
And the new version of the bundle here: http://panalaska.org/geek/?p=49
with states described here: http://patrickrhone.com/journal/archives/2006/05/175.html
What I like about the bundle is its really nice views of the information, organized by context, then by project. The file structure, while not really allowing for sub-projects, is appealing to me too with every project having its own file -- it can basically be displayed on screen or in Geektool without any editing.
One thing that it is missing is Quicksilver-inbox-type processing, but I submitted a script to Mike that does this and he seemed really interested in pursuing it.
I don't know of a way of converting between kGTD and GTD/2, but the Geektool export should create a nice file for exporting to a Palm.
I'm sure Mike can give you more up-to-date thinking on where the bundle is going and what will be included in the future.
Adam
On 16 Oct , 2006, at 5:45 AM, Alan Schmitt wrote:
Hello,
I'm currently using kGTD as my tool of choice, but a pure text- based solution looks very attracting. I see there are several bundles mentioning GTD and I was wondering what were their differences and if they were all maintained.
Additionally, is someone using one of these bundles and somehow synchronizing their GTD setup to a Palm? If so, I'd be delighted to hear about it.
Thanks a lot,
Alan
-- Alan Schmitt http://alan.petitepomme.net/
The hacker: someone who figured things out and made something cool happen. .O. ..O OOO
For new threads USE THIS: textmate@lists.macromates.com (threading gets destroyed and the universe will collapse if you don't) http://lists.macromates.com/mailman/listinfo/textmate
On 16 oct. 06, at 21:50, Adam Potthast wrote:
You can read about the original GTD bundle here: http://panalaska.org/geek/?p=43 and here: http://www.panalaska.org/GTD_Stuff/GTD_Intro_Revised.html (though note that exclusions.gtd should be excluded.gtd)
And the new version of the bundle here: http://panalaska.org/geek/?p=49
with states described here: http://patrickrhone.com/journal/archives/2006/05/175.html
Thank you for the links. I read the most recent ones, but I don't think I've seen the "Revised" link before.
What I like about the bundle is its really nice views of the information, organized by context, then by project. The file structure, while not really allowing for sub-projects, is appealing to me too with every project having its own file -- it can basically be displayed on screen or in Geektool without any editing.
This is nice.
One thing that it is missing is Quicksilver-inbox-type processing, but I submitted a script to Mike that does this and he seemed really interested in pursuing it.
I find this is a really important feature for me. In fact, unless I'm doing my weekly review, I've found that QuickSilver is the only way I input things in my kGTD inbox. (I also extensively use the "Append to file" QS action with a very simple text based tickler that I run on may machine.) If one could declare a simple text file as an inbox with this GTD bundle, this could be a simple way to have integration with QuickSilver.
I don't know of a way of converting between kGTD and GTD/2, but the Geektool export should create a nice file for exporting to a Palm.
Probably, what I need is a simple text file, that I can then automatically synchronize using Missing Sync.
I'm sure Mike can give you more up-to-date thinking on where the bundle is going and what will be included in the future.
Thank you for your explanations.
Alan
-- Alan Schmitt http://alan.petitepomme.net/
The hacker: someone who figured things out and made something cool happen. .O. ..O OOO
On Oct 16, 2006, at 12:57 PM, Alan Schmitt wrote:
On 16 oct. 06, at 21:50, Adam Potthast wrote:
You can read about the original GTD bundle here: http://panalaska.org/geek/?p=43 and here: http://www.panalaska.org/GTD_Stuff/GTD_Intro_Revised.html (though note that exclusions.gtd should be excluded.gtd)
And the new version of the bundle here: http://panalaska.org/geek/?p=49
with states described here: http://patrickrhone.com/journal/archives/2006/05/175.html
Thank you for the links. I read the most recent ones, but I don't think I've seen the "Revised" link before.
I've been working on the bundle a lot lately, thanks to a lot of great feedback from folks like Adam, so I had to update the blog a little. The big question will be whether to merge the two GTD bundles, or rename GTD2 to something more distinct and keep both going.
What I like about the bundle is its really nice views of the information, organized by context, then by project. The file structure, while not really allowing for sub-projects, is appealing to me too with every project having its own file -- it can basically be displayed on screen or in Geektool without any editing.
This is nice.
Thanks. I take no credit for this - the functionality comes from the TODO bundle, which got me interested in a GTD bundle.
One thing that it is missing is Quicksilver-inbox-type processing, but I submitted a script to Mike that does this and he seemed really interested in pursuing it.
I find this is a really important feature for me. In fact, unless I'm doing my weekly review, I've found that QuickSilver is the only way I input things in my kGTD inbox. (I also extensively use the "Append to file" QS action with a very simple text based tickler that I run on may machine.) If one could declare a simple text file as an inbox with this GTD bundle, this could be a simple way to have integration with QuickSilver.
Adam did a great job with this QS action. I plan to add it in to the bundle as soon as I get some time. I think the two areas that still need work are hotkey context expansion, using user defined contexts; and finding a simple way to deal with projects (or not). I don't want a solution that is more complicated than the problem.
I don't know of a way of converting between kGTD and GTD/2, but the Geektool export should create a nice file for exporting to a Palm.
Probably, what I need is a simple text file, that I can then automatically synchronize using Missing Sync.
The nice thing about the GTD bundles, like most things in TextMate, is that it is just a bunch of text files. Also, the GeekTool export command writes the active tasks view to a single text file.
I'm sure Mike can give you more up-to-date thinking on where the bundle is going and what will be included in the future.
Thank you for your explanations.
Adam makes it sound like I have a plan, and I do to a small extent. I want to add the QS action. I'd like to automate the export to GeekTool feature. There are probably a few more things that I'm forgetting (I need to work on my GTD Bundle project file!). However, my goal with the GTD bundle(s) was to create a simple tool for GTD task management in TextMate - something that would be easy to use and easy to manage. I'm always looking for feedback on ways to improve on it! Please let me know what you think after you've tried it! Thanks.
Mike
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Adam Potthast -
Alan Schmitt -
Alan Schussman -
Charilaos Skiadas -
Mike Mellor