Repeating my question about repeating tasks

TaskPaper
1

I keep asking this question. Here’s a copy of my latest request for help. Is it expected for users of TaskPaper to be expert at using scripts, so my question is too dumb to answer? Is everyone too preoccupied with Bike to pay any attention??
I would hate to give up using TP because of this but I’m starting to feel like I might have to.

COPY OF MY EARLIER POST:

I really really like TaskPaper, except for one thing: the lack of an easy way to create repeating tasks. I’ve tried downloading what seems to be the latest version of Danny Nelson’s script for repeating tasks (2.0.1), and put it in the Command Palette as he recommends. But I can’t figure out how to use it. Sorry to be stupid!

I wrote about this once before, and then didn’t follow up. But Jesse answered me, with some questions of his own:
link to script: Release v2.0.1 · dannynelson/taskpaper-repeat · GitHub
sample outline and what I’d like to do:
sample outline.taskpaper (54 Bytes)

2

Have you spoken to the author of the script ?

TaskPaper is, of course, a text editor, rather than a specialised data-base manager like Things, Structured etc etc

While TaskPaper is scriptable, which makes it possible for some users to extend its range, I think it may well be that if you are not at home with scripting, and things outside the designed functionality of TP are important to you, then a different kind of tool might smooth your path.

I would guess that the lack of response may simply express a feeling that it may not make much sense for other users to post unhelpful things like, “Sorry, not familiar with that script, and it looks a bit complex”

If anyone felt that they understood enough to help without putting aside several hours of their own, then I’m sure they would have.

(You can often harvest responses more quickly by minimising the effort imposed on potential readers – for example by concretising 1. Exactly what steps you have taken 2. What you expected vs what you saw 3. Which particular parts of the script documentation seem opaque, 4. etc etc)

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3

PS for repeating things, I personally use Structured - Daily Planner which is completely unscriptable, and doesn’t, as far as I recall, provide import / export or even data transfer by clipboard, but I seem to enjoy it, and it’s macOS / iOS / iPadOS cross-platform. Syncing seems to have worked well, so far.

PPS I did look at the outline which you attach above, entitled
sample outline and what I'd like to do

but I was left a bit unclear about what exactly you would like to do. The contents appear to be simply:

Read:

  • daily reading
  • Peter Brown
  • Chris Wickham

The specific relationship of those 4 lines to repeating tasks seems difficult to immediately discern.

Perhaps you want to set up a script, automatically triggered in some way, to update / add lines containing tags of a pattern like @repeat(daily) ?

In any case, my guess is that whatever the specifics of the problem really are, the shortest route to a solution probably passes through selecting a supplementary (more relevantly specialised) tool.

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4

This is probably the right answer:

Things did work when I followed instructions here:

For your example files:

  1. Create outline with “Before” outline shown below
  2. Open the Script in Script Editor and run the script
  3. Nothing will happen… this script needs to be run once at start, and it will just install self.
  4. The script actually does something when you Command-D to mark the above item as @done
  5. When you do that Command-D the script will generate the “After” outline shown below. In particular it marks current row as done, and then creates a new row that has an updated start date.

Hope that helps.

Before:

Read:
	- daily reading @start(2023-08-08) @repeat(+1 day)
	- Peter Brown
	- Chris Wickham

After:

Read:
	- daily reading @start(2023-08-09) @repeat(+1 day)
	- daily reading @start(2023-08-08) @done(2023-08-08)
	- Peter Brown
	- Chris Wickham
5

In my mind TaskPaper is probably better at handling repeated tasks in a more manual way, similar to the paper GTD system described in David Allens GTD book.

Here’s a first google result that seems related.

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