The todo.txt manager by Gina Trapani moved to a new site recently and has a nice short film to show you what you can do with it and how to use it.

I wrote previously that I edited the script to work as my own text-file manager. I updated the script and created a new .diff

Same changes apply.

My cell-phone provider lets me send messages to e-mail using txt and the reply will then come back to my cellphone through their e-mail to txt gateway.

This made me think of a setup where I'd send a message to my mailserver (txt message that gets forwarded to e-mail), requesting my shoppinglist. With all the new phones around a special phone e-mailaddress would also work.

First I activated the address by putting list@mydomain.com list in /etc/postfix/virtual and /etc/postfix/virtual-mailbox-maps

then I postmapped both: postmap /etc/postfix/virtual and postmap /etc/postfix/virtual-mailbox-maps (this step can wait till after the next one, but as it didn't really matter, why not straight away)

In the file /etc/postfix/aliases, I added: list: |/Users/tannie/bin/list.sh

This points the user 'list' to a script (the | puts it through) in my ~/bin directory called 'list.sh' View the content of that script

Anything else than 'list' will ofcourse work as an alias, you'd just have to set it up like that.

If I send a message to 'list+shop@mydomain.com' with the subject 'list @supermarket' it'll send back a message with the body:

potatoes @supermarket
 milk @supermarket @farmer
 eggs @supermarket

The script will only allow listing, it does pretend to 'do' things if you make the subject 'do 3' or something like that, but due to rights it won't actually do it. I don't mind, I just need it for listing anyway.

After discovering the todo.txt manager by Gina Trapani from lifehacker I decided to give it a try. All todo-applications annoyed the hell out of me, even though I really do like a good GUI. It just never did what I wanted to do, involved a lot of mouse-clicking and most of the time took too much time to set up and adjust to my needs. I don't mind using a mouse, but using only a mouse makes my arm hurt.

The project has since moved to todotxt.com and I joined the mailinglist. My version has a few additions the current official version doesn't have and I've uploaded the .diff.

The most important changes I made:

• Removed the need for a temporary file
• Items marked as 'done' get 'x:done ' in front of them. I prefer x:done over just plain x, x:done immediately means 'marked done' in my brain
• The x:done part gets stripped when archiving / reporting.
• The reportfile has a year attached, so it looks like report2006.txt
• The donefile gets created per week, looking like 2006-25.txt
• Creating multiple lists by using symlinks. I use 'manager' as a name for the script, and created symlinks to keep a shoppinglist and a todolist seperately (ln -s manager todo). The archive directory and the lists use the linkname to create the names, running 'todo' means it checks 'listtodo.txt', running 'shop' means it checks 'listshop.txt'
• The script does not yet create the archive directory, this needs a 'mkdir archives/shop' (or todo or whatever)
• Pretty outlining:

 1 do laundry
10 wash windows
 5 hoover

It all should 'just work' but be sure to backup your existing copy of your todo-list and your todo.sh.