todo.vim

Even though I love Todoist, I often find myself creating todo.txt files because they're very flexible and easy to work with. Over the last few years, I've evolved a todo.txt file format, with syntax highlighting and a few keyboard shortcuts. — Edit

This filetype is automatically applied to files that have the filename pattern *todo*.txt.

Concepts

Categories

Lines starting with >> mark the beginning of a category. These are groups of tasks that have whatever you want in common.

You can move with [[, [] to the beginning of a category backwards or forwards. Also, ]], ][ moves to the end of each category (the last line).

Markdown Categories

Sometimes a category may just contain notes, and it's more useful to have it highlighted as markdown. Categories that have ## following the >> and some option whitespace will be highlighted as markdown.

Tasks

Every line in the todo list is considered a task. A special symbol at the beginning of the list denotes the status of a task.

Symbol	Meaning	Keyboard Shortcut
✓	completed	Enter
✗	discarded	Ctrl+Enter
→	next	Ctrl+N
⇨	soon	Ctrl+X
~	postponed

Using a keyboard shortcut on a task that already has a status will first remove that status. You will have to press again to assign a new status.

Sub-Tasks

Tasks can be indented to for sub-tasks. Though tasks at the beginning of the line may omit the delimiter, sub-tasks must have a * preceded (a star followed by a space). The star would be replaced by the status symbol when operating with the keyboard shortcuts.

Status affects the way sub-tasks are displayed. A completed or discarded parent task will shade all sub-tasks, for example.

Tags

Words beginning with @ within a task are considered tags and are shown in a different color.

Highlights

In addition to status, whole tasks can be highlighted by using a symbol at the beginning of the line, either before or after the status. These highlights supercede status-based formatting. You can find different meanings for these, depending on context.

Symbol	Tentative Meaning
+	added / positive
-	removed / negative
@	expanded below / reference

Tested with Vader

1. Install vader.vim
2. Run :Vader test/*.vader to run all tests