Tasks

Summary

One of the important use cases for Dendron is productivity and task management. Whether it's a student keeping track of their homework assignments or a large team tracking their short and long term plans, Dendron's task system can help track and manage your work.

Features

Plain Tasks

The simplest method to keep track of tasks is to simply use Markdown checkmarks. Here's what that can look like:

- [ ] Prepare for the party
    - [ ] Send invitations
    - [ ] Order food
- [x] Rent payment #important

And here's how it looks like in the preview or publishing:

You can put these in a Journal to keep track of when you completed them, and add Tags like in the example above to organize them. Using list nesting, you can even describe a hierarchy of a big task and the parts of that task that need to be completed. If you need to jot down more information about a task, you can always create a Special Notes and link to it in the task.

Task Notes

Task notes are a special type of note that represent a task. Task notes have special frontmatter that give additional context.

---
id: sEnzNEw04L4BZ2lN00zuI
title: Task Example
desc: "This is an example of task note frontmatter"
updated: 1635228981637
created: 1635228506689
status: "x"
due: "2021.10.29"
priority: "H"
owner: "kaan"
tags:
  - size.small
---

When referencing a task note, rendering works differently when compared to other checkboxes in Markdown. Using the above example as a referenced note at task.example:

- [x] This is a task without note links
- [ ] This is a task with a [[referenced wikilink|dendron.topic.tasks]]
- [x] [[task note|task.example]] due:wed @kaan prio:high
  - The checkbox is automatically rendered from the `task.example` frontmatter values for task notes. `due:2021.10.29 @kaan prio:high`, along with the `[x]` prefix, is automatically rendered in the workspace editor.
    - `@kaan`: Comes from `owner: 'alice'` in the `task.example` frontmatter
    - `prio:high`: Comes from `priority: 'H'` in the `task.example` frontmatter
    - `due:2021.10.29`: Comes from `due: 'wed'` in the `task.example` frontmatter

Todo Tree Integration

Integation with Todo Tree.

If you set todoIntegration to true, task notes will create a TODO: keyword in the frontmatter that should be picked up by TODO tree.

Getting Started

Creating a task note

There are 2 ways to create a task note, you can either use the toggle in your regular lookup bar, or you can use the Create Task Note command. They both achieve the same result, although the task create command comes with some default settings.

A screenshot displaying an open note that lists 3 tasks, each showing off different features of task notes. On the top right of the image is a lookup bar with the task toggle selected.

Task notes are same as regular notes, except that they contain some special keys in their frontmatter. These keys are inserted by default when you use the toggle or the command, but you can also add them yourself.

Whenever you link to a task note, these keys will display the status of that task: this works in the editor, preview, and published sites. You can disable the status view in preview and publishing by setting enableTaskNotes.

Setting task status / Marking a task as complete

You can use the Set Task Status and Complete Task commands to change the status of a task, or to mark it as complete. Alternatively, you can also manually edit the frontmatter to change the status to anything you want.

Keyboard shortcut for a task status

You can create a keyboard shortcut that sets the task to a specific status.

To do so, use the Preferences: Open Keyboard Shortcuts (JSON) command to open the shortcuts file. In this file, add a section so the file will look like the following:

[
  // ... other keybindings
  {
    "key": "ctrl+shift+t y", // or any other shortcut you want to use
    "command": "dendron.setTaskStatus",
    "when": "editorFocus && dendron:pluginActive",
    "args": {
      "setStatus": "y" // the status you want to set
    }
  }
]

Configuration

Configuration for tasks are under workspace.task namespace

workspace:
  task:
    ...

General

Task Display

Dendron uses this configuration to map the priority and status symbols used in the frontmatter to what gets displayed on the screen. By changing these configurations, you can change what gets displayed.

workspace:
    ...
    task:
        statusSymbols:
            "": " "
            "done": "x"
            ...
        prioritySymbols:
            H: "high"
            M: "medium"
            L: "low"
        taskCompleteStatus: ["x", "done"]

Extensions


Children
  1. Commands
  2. Config

Backlinks