jrnlwarrior - taskwarrior and jrnl cross-pollination

This little script allows simple interaction between taskwarrior and a jrnl file. It parses the jrnl file and transfers accomplished and unfinished tasks to taskwarrior, as well as adding today's tasks as an entry to the jrnl file.

More specifically, it:

• transfers completed tasks to taskwarrior by logging them and removes the lines from this file
  (marked with [x] or x at the beginning of the line)
• transfers incomplete tasks to taskwarrior by adding them as new tasks scheduled at the date of the entry they appear under
  (marked with an empty [ ] at the beginning of their line)
• adds an entry for today's date if none exists yet and populates it with due/overdue tasks from taskwarrior

All three of these operations only operate on entries which are marked with a special title (todotxt by default), though this can be changed through a regex option. That means, it is also entirely possible to have other entries (with the same date) which will simply be ignored by the script.

To accomplish this it borrows a little from the todo.txt syntax --- namely the idea of (A) (B) (C) prioritization and x task done syntax (i.e. starting a line with x or [x] means it represents an accomplished task).

Usage

Point the file to your jrnl file (ideally it needs to be a single file) and set the syntax which declares a todo entry within it.

./jrnlwarrior.py -f ~/.local/share/jrnl/journal.txt -b 'todotxt'

The command above sets the script to work on a specific jrnl file and only work on entries which have exactly todotxt as their title. The settings above are also the default settings of the script.

BE AWARE that this script actively changes your jrnl file during normal operations. If you are afraid of destructive operations, you have two options: Create a backup of your jrnl file before running this script to be able to diff the two afterwards. Or, to see what the program would do without actually implementing any changes, invoke dry run mode:

./jrnlwarrior.py -n

It will spit out a list of tasks that are added to taskwarrior, as well as its own options, lines to be removed from the file and any to-do entries added to the file. It will not change your jrnl file in any way.

If you want to switch off one of the three ways this script connects the two, you can use the -L, -I, -T options which turn off logging, adding, or creating entries respectively.

./jrnlwarrior.py -I -T

The above invocation will only log completed tasks to taskwarrior. Adding new to-dos and creating today entries is turned off.

./jrnlwarrior.py -T

This will create a one-way connection to taskwarrior, by transferring both new and completed tasks to the program. However, tasks to be done today will not be transferred back to this file.

Scope

This was a fun weekend project and it shines through --- the code got increasingly spaghetti towards the end (especially entry-adding to jrnl file was one Sunday night hour), it's not packaged particularly well and there are no tests of any kind implemented.

I am happily using the script in my daily workflow, however some assumptions are made and edge cases will happen at some point. Please don't run it willy-nilly on a long-treasured jrnl file without having proper backups. Otherwise, there is no clear road-map --- mostly, I think, the code should be cleaned up and a way found that handles taskwarrior task duplication better (with uuid or description comparisons or similar means).

I will probably not be able to devote much more time to this in the foreseeable future, but if you find an issue tell me nonetheless or, even better, see if you can spot how to fix it and I will gladly merge the changes in!