Important This post was created to inform TaskPaper 2 users of what’s new in TaskPaper 3. To learn about TaskPaper 3 changes please see the release notes.
Everything and nothing!
TaskPaper is a modern rewrite of TaskPaper 2, all the code is new and there are new features in the app. With that said the core TaskPaper experience is the same. There are no new features in the underlying file format. TaskPaper is still just plain text formatted lists of projects, tasks, notes, and tags.
There are some of the new editor features:
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Folding items – You can now fold items, hiding the items indented under them. To fold and item click the blue bullet point to the left of the items text.
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Focus projects – You can now truly focus projects instead of just filtering to show a single project. The difference is when you focus a project like this you’ll no longer see all the leading indentation. This means you can create deep levels of subprojects and still edit them comfortably, instead of seeing a bunch of leading whitespace everywhere.
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Outline level guides – TaskPaper now reenforces the underlying outline structure by drawing guides down from each item that contains other items.
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Tabs are no longer used in editor – Tabs are still part of the underlying file format. But when you open your file in TaskPaper tabs selectable characters in the editor. This puts the focus more on items and indentation without having to muck through tabs.
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Search syntax – TaskPaper’s search syntax has been updated to better search item hierarchies. Basic tag and boolean searches are still the same, but there are a lot more options now … documentation on the way! If you’ve used FoldingText TaskPaper searches are very similar.
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Date/Time syntax – TaskPaper now has a standard syntax for dealing with dates and times and relative dates and times. For example you can now search for items that are due “next week”.
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LESS/CSS Powered Themes – TaskPaper now uses LESS/CSS syntax for creating themes. The style properties and elements are different then HTML DOM (more limited), but generally TaskPaper styling should be much more approachable and familiar to people who already know LESS/CSS.
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JavaScript Scripting API – TaskPaper 3 has an OS X native user interface, but behind the scenes the outline model is implemented in JavaScript. Your scripts have direct access to TaskPaper’s underlying outline model. Here’s how to get started scripting TaskPaper.