Manual re-ordering of tasks

[jamie9090]

Amazing plugin - thank you.

Possible to enable manual re-ordering of tasks when using a task query with no sorting added?

[schemar]

Thank you for the idea @jamie9090. Can you please elaborate a bit? How would you re-order the tasks? Mouse click and drag?

[jamie9090]

I would be happy with drag/drop or hot keys like ctrl + up/down arrow keys.

The latter is the same as the Outliner plugin for Obsidian.

Thanks for reaching out!

[schemar]

Hey @jamie9090,
I am not sure hotkeys would be possible. You cannot really interact with task query results with the keyboard, as they are rendered. Or is this now possible in "preview" mode?

Anyway, I think this is not possible to do with the current design of the Tasks plugin (code-wise).
The main issue I see is keeping the order when tasks change or beyond restarts of Obsidian. The Tasks plugin doesn't have IDs or similar to identify tasks. When you change a file, Tasks doesn't know which task stayed, got deleted, was updated, and so on. Tasks simply throws away all known tasks from that file and re-parses the file.

[Peeja]

Theoretically, it could maintain an order by assigning ranks to the results and writing that info to the code block itself. That is, the explicit ordering would become part of the query, and could be editable with drag-and-drop writing back to the query. That wouldn't be simple to do, and I can't tell if it would actually be useful enough to be worth it. But I'll throw it in here in case it sparks something. :D

(Having written that, I realize now I've only "solved" half the problem: there still aren't IDs to refer to the tasks by. It could add ^abc123 block IDs to the tasks for you? But that could just be messy, and it would be pretty easy to delete one of those while editing a task, so it may not be terribly useful.)

[claremacrae]

I think that this is so far away from the current design of the plugin that I'm going to mark it as wontfix.

Should future developments of the plugin, or features inside Obsidian, make this become more tractable, and if there is sufficient demand, this could always be reconsidered in future.

[ericnitschke]

Bumping this. Drag-and-drop reorder would be immensely helpful for task prioritization. This, or the Kanban plugin needs to pull tasks from anywhere.

[claremacrae]

Closing, as not feasible for the reasons given by schemar above.

[claremacrae]

Hahah. It’s a Discussion so can’t be closed.

Which is why I already marked it as Won’t Fix. :-)

[claremacrae]

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

[claremacrae]

Another request received:
#2552