Introduction

This program converts a particular type of org-mode file into tsv format for further processing by tsv-utils (or any other program that works with tsv files).

I wrote this to make it easy to run queries on my org-mode files holding various lists of tasks, things to revisit in the future, etc. I haven't found a better way to capture these lists than using org-mode in Emacs. Having said that, org files are just text files that can be created/edited in any text editor. It is therefore possible for you to use orgtotsv without touching Emacs.

You can obviously query org files in Emacs. However, I don't always have Emacs available, or maybe I don't want to limit myself to working in Emacs (there are a lot of other things I might want to do with these files). Moreover, org-mode can sometimes be unfriendly depending on what you're trying to do, and it's not always well documented.

Installation

There is really no installation. Just do the following:

dmd orgtotsv

and you're done. Any recent (last few years) version of dmd should work. Although it hasn't been tested, it should work with recent versions of LDC and GDC too.

Example

Suppose you have a file named things.org:

* Eat breakfast <6:00 am>
* Buy groceries <2019-10-28 Mon> @home #essentials
- Pork chops
- Ham
- Bacon
- Steak
- Cheese
- Beer
- Wine
- Rum
- Vodka
* Read the Smith paper @office #research #reading
* Meet the plumber <2019-10-29 Tue> <11:30 am>
He needs to check the downstairs sink. It's been draining slowly for a
week now, even though I dumped a bottle of drain opener inside it.
* Eat dinner with Michael Howley #work #sales <2019-10-30 Wed> <7:30 pm>
Important points:
- We've won service awards.
- We have the lowest price.
- We can customize any of our products, and we're the only ones in this
    market that will do that.

There are a few things to note about this file. I might want to query by context (items that start with @) or by tag (items that start with #). Those appear in the task description. If I want to view all @office tasks when I get to the office in the morning, I can use tsv-utils to query the task description for items with an appropriate regex.

Some items have notes associated with them. I don't just want a reminder to buy groceries. I want to be able to see my entire grocery list. The notes will be hidden in org-mode by default, but they will appear as regular lines in the .org file itself. orgtotsv will add the entire note as a part of the task, after converting line feeds and tabs to the appropriate ascii control codes. The notes themselves can be written in markdown format if you want. There is no need for the notes to be written in org-mode format.

Some items have dates and/or times associated with them. I may want to view all items with a date of today or tomorrow. orgtotsv will pull that information out from each task description (the first line) and add them to the tsv file. If one or both are not there, it will be blank.

Running

./orgtotsv things.org

prints the output to the screen. This example file and its output is found in the repo. You can use

./orgtotsv things.org > things.tsv

to write the file to disk if that's what you need. It prints to stdout because the intended use case is piping into tsv-utils. See the examples folder for an example showing how to filter for all tasks due in the next two days sorted by date.

The output is in four columns. Column 1 is the task description, column 2 is the date in YYYY-MM-DD format, column 3 is the time in HH:MM am or H:MM am format, and column 4 is the note associated with that task.

This is the entirety of what orgtotsv does. The tsv file can then be queried using tsv-utils. You will want to replace the control codes for the unit separator (hex 1F) with \t and the record separator (hex 1E) with \n in order to recover the original values of the notes.