Tasks

Tasks (jasem todo)

jasem todo is the task manager. You add tasks in plain language and jasem extracts a title, deadline, priority, and tags; everything else is for viewing, searching, completing, and editing them.

task and tasks are accepted as aliases for todo, so jasem task "…" works too.

Adding a task

Anything that isn't a known view or verb is treated as a new task description:

$ jasem todo "pay rent next friday, high priority, finance"
✓ added #1: pay rent
  priority=high  deadline=2026-06-19  tags=finance

$ jasem todo "review Ali PR by tomorrow, work"
✓ added #2: review Ali PR
  priority=medium  deadline=2026-06-17  tags=work

• The deadline is read from natural language — next friday, tomorrow, in 3 days, june 20, 2026-07-01, … (see Natural Language Input).
• The priority is high, medium (default), or low.
• Tags are short topic words you mention (work, finance, personal).
• Commas are optional — they just help the parser.

Force-adding text that starts with a command word

If your task literally starts with a word like list, done, set, or rm, jasem would treat it as a verb. Use add to force it to be a new task:

jasem todo add "done the dishes tonight"     # adds a task titled "done the dishes"
jasem todo add "list everyone for the party" # adds a task, doesn't list

Quoting also keeps shell metacharacters (& ! * ( )) literal.

Viewing tasks

A bare jasem todo shows open tasks, soonest deadline first:

$ jasem todo
 Open tasks ──────────────────────────────────────────────
 ●  1  ⚑ high  in 4d  pay rent      #finance  today
 ●  2    med   today  call dentist  #health   2d
 ──────────────────────────── 2 open  ·  1 due today

The columns are: bullet, id, priority, relative deadline, title, tags, and age (how long ago it was created). Deadlines render as today, tomorrow, in 4d, in 2w, overdue, etc.

Command	Shows
jasem todo	open tasks (same as list)
jasem todo list (alias ls)	open tasks
jasem todo today	tasks due today
jasem todo week	tasks due within the next 7 days
jasem todo overdue	past deadline and not done — shown in red
jasem todo all	everything, including completed tasks

Filtering a view by category

Append one or more categories to a list view to keep only tasks that have all of them:

jasem todo list work             # open tasks tagged work
jasem todo list work urgent      # open tasks tagged BOTH work and urgent
jasem todo all finance           # all tasks (incl. done) tagged finance

Listing categories

$ jasem todo tags
Categories — open tasks
    3  #work
    1  #finance
    1  #health

Counts cover open tasks only.

Searching

find (alias search) matches text in a task's title or tags, case-insensitively:

jasem todo find rent
jasem todo find "ali pr"

Completing tasks

Mark one or more tasks complete by id (ids come from any list):

$ jasem todo done 1
✓ completed: #1 pay rent

$ jasem todo done 2 3 5        # several at once

Completed tasks disappear from the open views but remain in jasem todo all.

Deleting tasks

Permanently remove tasks by id (rm, or the aliases remove/del/delete):

$ jasem todo rm 4
✓ removed 1 task(s)

$ jasem todo rm 4 5 6

Deletion is permanent. If you only want it out of your open list, use done instead — or, because everything is plain text, recover the row from git or a backup of ~/.jasem/tasks.md.

Editing a field

set (alias edit) changes exactly one field of one task:

jasem todo set 3 priority high
jasem todo set 3 deadline next friday
jasem todo set 3 deadline 2026-07-01
jasem todo set 3 category work finance     # replaces the tag set

Fields and accepted aliases:

Field	Aliases	Values
priority	prio, p	high · medium · low
deadline	due, date, d	any date phrase, or a clear-word to remove it
category	categories, tag, tags, c	space/comma-separated tags, or a clear-word

Clearing a field — to remove a deadline or all categories, set the value to any of: none, no, clear, remove, -, n/a, na, null.

jasem todo set 3 deadline none      # task now has no deadline
jasem todo set 3 category clear     # task now has no tags

(priority can't be cleared — every task is high, medium, or low.)

Where tasks are stored

Tasks live in ~/.jasem/tasks.md as a Markdown table you can hand-edit. See Data Files for the exact column layout.

See also

• Natural Language Input — every date phrase jasem understands
• Command Reference — the one-page cheat-sheet
• Time Tracking and Spending — the sibling namespaces