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.[^moderntw]

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

By default the script generally 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 may diverge from taskwarrior setups still.

This program can be configured in 3 different ways: options set in your regular taskwarrior taskrc file, environment variables or options given on the command line.

Taskrc configuration

All options can be changed directly in your taskrc file. This may be most useful for settings which do not change often for you, such as the note extension or notes directory.

The following settings are supported:

data.location # used for the taskwarrior data directory
notes.dir # set the notes directory itself
notes.ext # set the note file extension
notes.annot # set the annotation added to tasks with notes
notes.editor # set the editor used to open notes
notes.quiet # set topen to hide all verbose information during use

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.

Environment variables

Each option can be changed through setting the corresponding environment variable.

These are the same as the taskrc file options with a prepended TOPEN_ and dots turned to underscores.

The following settings are supported:

TASKRC= # taskwarrior config file location
TASKDATA= # taskwarrior data directory location
TOPEN_NOTES_DIR= # set the notes directory itself
TOPEN_NOTES_EXT= # set the note file extension
TOPEN_NOTES_ANNOT= # set the annotation added to tasks with notes
TOPEN_NOTES_EDITOR= notes.editor # set the editor used to open notes
TOPEN_NOTES_QUIET= # set topen to hide all verbose information during use

CLI options

Finally, each option can be set through the cli itself.

To find out all the available options use topen --help.