How to Build an Agenda-View?

TaskPaper
1

Hi Folks,

I am wondering, with little technical skills, how to build a more accessable agenda view with Taskpaper. Right now I just have four searched views:

  • Priority (the one task I am focussing on until finished)
  • Today (all pending items that I should finish today)
  • Tomorrow
  • This week
  • Next week

Each search result gives me all the nesting and while it just takes a bit of practice to scan the search result to get the desired result (understanding what I should do next, next week etc.), I miss the agenda view from org (I switched from org).

What are your thoughts? Did anyone have a similar issue and perhaps even a solution?

2

I don’t know orgs agenda view… is the main difference that it doesn’t show the nesting?

3

Sorry for the delay. Got married and lost track of communications. :slight_smile:

The main difference is the ability to handcraft a view. The following is an example of a customized agenda-view (not mine)

org-agenda-html
org-agenda-html838×1742 351 KB

When I create a view on my agenda it is not just some list. I want to define a governing structure (like the time line of the day or groupings according to the nature of the task) and then let the tasks have their correct place within the structure.

It is written a bit complicated but I tried to generalise from the concept of having a daily agenda view or just seeing the next week. With org-agenda, for example, I was able to start the day by reviewing the daily tasks and get a feel for the day, seeing that my morning will be stuffed but my afternoon will be free. Or seeing certain types of tasks and getting a feel what the day will be (e.g. writing a lot of workout plans vs. doing research).

So, there are some already existing structures (like the agenda for the day) which could be automated, some groupings (easily managed with tags and rules) and the overall selection and positioning of each structure into a full view depending on what you want to get out of it.

4

Personally, if I wanted to generate custom reports of this kind, I would:

  1. write a filter to map the TaskPaper file (or a defined collection of .taskpaper files) to an XML / XMLInclude representation of the TaskPaper outline(s)
  2. define and generate the report that I wanted with an XQuery engine (probably the XQuery engine built into Apple’s ObjC classes)

(There’s a very old demo of something similar, based on OPML files, here txtquery-tools/readme.md at master · RobTrew/txtquery-tools)

These days, Bike (which has a native XML/HTML file format, and which may, I think, acquire a mechanism for key:value attribute tagging at some point) might be a better vehicle for XQuery custom-report generation.

(I already use XQuery to search across a folder-full of Bike file day notes)

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