Topen - simple taskwarrior note editing

A script without bells and whistles. Focuses on letting you quickly:

• create notes for taskwarrior tasks
• edit notes for taskwarrior tasks

It does both by simply being invoked with topen <task-id>.

Provide a taskwarrior task id or uuid and topen creates a new note file or lets you edit an existing one. Additionally it adds a small annotation to the task to let you see that there exists a note file next time you view the task.

Should just work as-is without additional configuration in most modern taskwarrior setups.¹

Can be configured through environment variables or cli options, see below.

Can be used as-is with the topen command or directly from taskwarrior by being aliased in your taskrc:

alias.note=exec topen

And you can open any note with your usual taskwarrior workflow, by doing task note <id>.

That's all there is to it.

Installation

You can install the script with your favorite python environment manager:

uv tool install git+https://git.martyoeh.me/Marty/topen.git

pipx install git+https://git.martyoeh.me/Marty/topen.git

pip install git+https://git.martyoeh.me/Marty/topen.git

Or just manually copy the topen file to a directory in your PATH.

If you just want to try the script out, feel free to do so by invoking it e.g. with uvx git+https://git.martyoeh.me/Marty/topen.git.

Only has tasklib as a dependency.

Configuration

TASK_RC = os.getenv("TASKRC", "~/.config/task/taskrc") # not implemented yet
TASK_DATA_DIR = os.getenv("TASKDATA", "~/.local/share/task")
TOPEN_DIR = os.getenv("TOPEN_DIR", "~/.local/share/task/notes")
TOPEN_EXT = os.getenv("TOPEN_EXT", "md")
TOPEN_ANNOT = os.getenv("TOPEN_ANNOT", "Note")
TOPEN_EDITOR = os.getenv("EDITOR") or os.getenv("VISUAL", "nano")
TOPEN_QUIET = os.getenv("TOPEN_QUIET", False)

These are all environment variables offered, needs improved documentation.

Ultimately the goal would probably be to support reading from a taskwarrior 'taskrc' file, which can then be optionally overwritten with env variables, which can then be optionally overwritten with cli options.

This is not fully implemented -- we support the above environment variables and cli options, that's it.

---

1. The script assumes your taskwarrior setup follows the XDG base directory suggestions. That means, taskrc in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/task/taskrc, usually ~/.config/task/taskrc. Furthermore, at the moment it assumes the taskwarrior data residing in the $XDG_DATA_HOME/task directory. This will diverge from many taskwarrior setups still and can be set through the cli option --task-data. The idea is for future topen versions to recognize the task data directory from the taskrc file itself but this has not been implemented. ↩︎