How would custom task states interact with CSS theming work? [Answer: OK to go ahead]

[claremacrae]

Hi @esm7,

I wanted to run by you an experiment I've done in my own vault, to make the first baby steps to support of custom statuses.

If, after reading this, you think it will conflict with your work in #877, then I'll very happily hold off doing any more work towards releasing this until we have merged in your styling work, and I can experiment with it myself.

My guess is that the styling snippet used will conflict - which is why I'm asking here for your view, to not tread on your toes 😄

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A summary of what I have done

• When I have SlRvb's Alternate Checkboxes installed
• And I have made the following relatively small changes to the Tasks code:
  • claremacrae/obsidian-tasks@e1db7e7...claremacrae:obsidian-tasks:75de4be953bd7a078faf22e9dca747b1db2a90e8
• Then I can use a hard-coded set of characters inside [ ] to give different styles, but still have them appear as incomplete tasks.

What it looks like

• I have opted to treat these tasks as not done:

- [ ] Unchecked
- [/] Half Done
- [!] Important
- [d] Doing

The characters are hard-coded for now, to see how it worked.

So these are what the new status types look like:

A particular appeal is the easy addition of [-] to represent a cancelled task, which has been requested a few times,

[esm7]

Sorry for the holdup, I ran so much behind on so many topics!
The Alternate Checkboxes CSS is pretty big so it's hard for me to understand what kind of classes it expects and uses, but I think that nonetheless you should go ahead and continue with this direction if that's the way to go (if you haven't already). The changes I'm doing are geared towards supplying extra classes that can be used for styling, and not breaking the structure of task lines, so it will likely either be compatible, or close enough for me to bridge the gap.

[claremacrae]

That's super. Thanks very much @esm7!

Is there anything I could do to help you out with this work? Perhaps do some preparatory refactoring for you?

I'm going to steal the comment you added for InlineRenderer, as it helped me understand the code better!

[esm7]

I'm actually almost done splitting the PR as discussed, and it's been like that for many weeks now without progress, since I ran out of time and had to turn to other obligations right before I was able to do some last finishes :(
I'm quite sure that I'll be able to get back to this in the upcoming days, but if we'll see in a week or two that I was over-optimistic and took more obligations than I can chew (a tendency I sure have), maybe we can indeed discuss ways to hand over some of the work.