Support for TODO/DOING/DONE or NOW/LATER Org mode-style tasks

[shuyunzhang99]

I use the program Logseq with my Obsidian vault which creates tasks according to the following two formats:

• TODO / DOING / DONE
• NOW / LATER / DONE
  Because they are missing the string '[ ]', they are not recognised as tasks in the same way as checkboxes.

It would be amazing to treat these lines in the same way as tasks and have an option to change their states to look like how they appear in Logseq / Org mode:

Here's how they currently look in Obsidian:

[santiyounger]

This is a great idea. I'm a heavy user of Org-mode and it's a shame that Obsidian doesn't natively support .org files.
However like @shuyunzhang99 said this is a great idea for those of us who use Logseq with .md files and being able to leverage this functionality in Obsidian as well.

I think this idea is great and can benefit a lot of people, but it's definitely mostly oriented for people that use Logseq or are familiar with org-mode. Great idea

[ryanpcmcquen]

Would be nice for us to work together to bring this functionality to Org Mode files as well with my plugin:
https://github.com/ryanpcmcquen/obsidian-org-mode

[schemar]

Yes, definitely. It's just that my time is super limited and I am not sure I could commit to bringing parts of tasks into a library to be consumed by other plug-ins 🙈 Though the author of slated already suggested something similar, so maybe it's worth it to have a shared "tasks" backend. It would be quite some work, though. I think it would be more work initially than adding org-mode task support to obsidian tasks 🤔

[schemar]

Thank you for the idea @shuyunzhang99, I really like it.

It would be some effort, as the current implementation uses obsidian's API to access specifically checklist items. I would need to rewrite that so that the plugin reads all list items instead and looks for checklists and org-mode tasks. I haven't thought about it much, but I think this would need to be a setting in the config. The default would be the current way. And then there could be options to maybe have only org-mode tasks or allow for both. Supporting org-mode tasks would definitely slow down the startup of tasks, as it would need to parse much more lines than just checklist items (every list item in the vault is a potential org-mode task).

Then there is basically a second idea hidden within this one: more statuses for tasks. There is already a discussion to support DOING, for example. More statuses are also something I would love to see in obsidian tasks. It's just that my time is limited and more statuses are not a priority right now, as I want to get a basic working function in the community repo at the moment, so any bug has priority, at the moment.

Now, if you still have the time, you can listen to me mutter about the past 🙊 You can freely ignore everything below this line 😋

When I initially decided to write a tasks plugin for obsidian, I decided that I don't want checklist items to be treated as tasks. I thought that checklist items are things like groceries, check-lists of certain procedures, and so on. And I didn't want those non-task checklist items to be picked up by the tasks plugin. I didn't want those to clutter my task overview of actionable things I need to do. So what did I do? For my proof of concept implementation, I decided to identify tasks by - TODO and - DONE. You can still see the old readme here 🙈 https://github.com/schemar/obsidian-tasks/blob/b1554080a81beab3f62b229cc212c74d17fd918f/README.md

Back then, a lot of people asked why I didn't stick to the markdown standard. And I think those questions were very valid. After all, obsidian is a markdown editor, so you would expect tasks to be tracked as markdown checklist items. When I did the rewrite from proof of concept to something a little more useful, I switched to the new obsidian APIs available from version 0.12. They let me access markdown tasks almost directly without looking through the entire vault (with the previous implementation, I was checking every line of every file in your vault for - TODO or - DONE). So it is much more efficient now. To be able to differentiate checklist items from tasks, I added the global filter.

Of course, now people ask for it to be done the other way around 😂 Well, I am definitely considering it, thank you for starting the discussion 💚

[shuyunzhang99]

Thank you so much for such a thoughtful response, I really do agree that the power of Obsidian is to configure it to individual tastes and workflows. Really inspired by your passion and dedication to sharing the product of your hard work with all of us!

[ryanpcmcquen]

I didn't realize there was a 'tasks' API. So if I registered tasks from my Org Mode plugin in there, your plugin would already pick them up, right?

[schemar]

That’s not possible, as far as I am aware. The metadata cache of obsidian makes certain data items available per file. E.g. tags and list items. See here for list items: https://github.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-api/blob/master/obsidian.d.ts#L378

In addition, each list item has a property task: https://github.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-api/blob/master/obsidian.d.ts#L1349

I assume these are simply parsed from the file via a regex.

That’s also the reason why adding support for e.g. - TODO would make the tasks plugin slower. We couldn’t access the task property of the list item cache anymore, we would need to run our own regex on every list item to determine whether it is a task. But, as stated above, that’s probably not a real issue in practice. The issue is rather the effort it takes and my limited resources ...

[ryanpcmcquen]

I would hate for you to have to parse .org files. I'd like to have my plugin register the task property, as well as the links property for Org Mode files, that would make Org Mode feel like a native part of Obsidian, rather than an outsider with limited functionality.

[schemar]

Well ... We could start thinking about a way where your plugin could create tasks within my plugin. I would need to register an event listener and you would need to emit events as tasks. It’s not trivial, but it should work. I talked to Liam today about integrating with his calendar plugin and that is kind of how he does that... It wouldn’t be possible today or tomorrow, but if you think this makes sense we could slowly start defining the interface. What do you think?

[ryanpcmcquen]

Related:
ryanpcmcquen/obsidian-org-mode#4

[schemar]

Thank you! Some questions I also added there (not necessarily to you; just open topics):

what about the additional statuses that I currently don’t support? What about in-line rendering of the markdown preview? Would queries for tasks be sufficient? Would tasks need to render different for org mode than “normal” mode (checkboxes)?

[jroachgit]

An option (manual work around) for this would be to include the Status in the task title.
Also - what would really help, is to have not only a "due date," but a "do date" - then you could extract tasks that you are meant to be working on, but aren't necessarily due yet.

[schemar]

Regarding “do dates”: “scheduling” is being discussed in #67 😊

[rscircus]

Hi, thanks for your efforts so far. :)

Right now, I'm really struggling with logseq (org-mode) vs. obsidian / integrating logseq (org-mode) into obsidian or the other way around for my projects/tasks. Obsidian is fantastic as personal knowledge management and also planner (i.e., with the day planner plugin), however, I can't track and organize projects/tasks very well here. Logseq in it's org-mode flavor is just much better when following GTD for instance.

From my point of view this really pulls in many, and unfortunately opposite, directions here. Especially, when people ask why you not follow the "markdown standard" @schemar - my first thought was: Which one of these exactly? ;-)

So maybe, it makes sense to integrate one into the other similar like other plugins do it... i.e., the todoist plugin.

I leave this note for discussion if there is any interest on that. If there is enough traction I'd implement this. :)

[schemar]

Thank you for your input @rscircus. I am not sure what you are suggesting. Could you please elaborate? Do you mean that the Tasks plugin should support org-mode syntax for tasks? Just for parsing or also for editing?

What exactly is the Todoist plugin doing well, at the moment? I didn't quite get that.

Thank you for you participation!

[pcause]

In other requests there have been suggestions to put a check or other characters in the brackets to indicate status. What is we have an emoji for status and then the text of the status, and allow a rich list. the status is xxx filter is then just matching on the emoji existing in the description and the text after the emoji. That wouldn't require a big core change would it. And, someone would easily add a convert to/from org mode format for this.

[claremacrae]

Just to set expectations: I wanted to note that ORG MODE is not likely to be a priority for the Tasks plugin for the foreseeable future.

There are many, many good requests for improvements to things which are core to its current purpose of managing Tasks using variants of Obsidian's - [ ] format for tasks - and I would rather spend volunteer time on core features that fill in gaps and fix bugs for its current users.

[claremacrae]

I am therefore marking this as "status: wontfix" for now.

[claremacrae]

Since Discussions can now be closed, I am closing this, which was already marked as "status: wontfix".