Surprising aspects of v0.3 CLI

[dbr]

The CLI is a bit surprising, possibly in part because I've not really used taskwarrior:

1. If I add some tasks, then run "task start 1" it clobbers all task descriptions with the string "1". Same with "task start --help".
   239.21

I think taskwarrior supports both task 1 start and task start 1. It prints a "are you sure?" message on task start.

2. Having batch operations highlights need for at least a basic undo system

3. I'd "almost" suggest we require quoting the task text, as it removes ambiguity in behaviour

For example 'task add --help" seems like a reasonable thing to try, but not clear how to support both that producing help text, and "task add Implement --help for my app" adding a new task. Whereas if tasks strings need quoted, like task add "Implement --help for my app" the behaviour is is well established

I'm not sure about this as it breaks from taskwarrior in quite an obvious way

[djmitche]

Let's get an issue filed for task start 1 -- that should work. In general, I think things are almost always unambiguous, and with sufficient testing we can ensure we do the "natural" thing in the corner cases.

Similarly, I think it makes sense to reproduce some of TW's "are you sure" prompts -- those were good UX decisions! I think at least one of them is based on the number of tasks affected?

Let's get an issue filed to add --help support for each subcommand, too. That's an exception to the CLI model that doesn't typically use --xyz options, because people do tend to guess --help!

Undo is #92. It's hard!

Quoting is always available, but I think we can continue to get away without requiring it. So task add "Implement --help for my app" already works. The escape hatch for things like creating a task with description "--help" (for which quoting won't be of any use) is task add -- --help. All of that could certainly use some better documentation.

[djmitche]

@dbr did you want to add some issues for the above, and mark this discussion as answered?

[dbr]

Yep done!

https://github.com/djmitche/taskchampion/issues/177 - task start 1
https://github.com/djmitche/taskchampion/issues/178 - allowing help arg
https://github.com/djmitche/taskchampion/issues/179 - "Are you sure" prompts

[dbr]

Hmm, it's only possible to mark "Q&A" threads as completed (which I changed this to be as a test, but.. it's a bit clunky)