Minus.app Integration with Taskpaper

Minus.app is a free Mac app to help users focus on a task, using a range of tools, including showing the task in a floating window and hiding distractions. Minus integrates with Things, Reminders and Omnifocus to automatically pick up the next task that you should focus on. It turns out that it’s quite easy to integrate this with TaskPaper.

(the way this is going to work is to continually export the task in your TaskPaper file that has a specific tag @na to a text file. Then Minus will use whatever is in this text file as the task to display)

  1. Use something like Keyboard Maestro, Launchd or Cron to regularly run the following script (replacing ~/Dropbox/… with the path to your taskpaper file):

grep '@na' ~/Dropbox/taskpaper/tasks.taskpaper | grep -oEi '\-([^@]*)' | head -1 | cut -c 2- | cut -c -80 > ~/minustask.txt

  1. Configure Minus.app to read from ~/minustask.txt

Now Minus should show whichever task you add @na to. It shows only the text up to the first tag, and then truncates it to 80 characters.

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