Show HN: I Made a Todo List for Developer Power Users [video]

[skytrias]

Hey HN,

I've been working on Todool for a year trying to make an editor that fits my development workflow.

a) Fast text-editing without needing to touch the mouse

b) Multi-Selection to perform commands on more than a single line

c) Switching between List/Kanban mode

You can try the free demo at itch.io for (Windows/Linux) https://skytrias.itch.io/todool#demo

[bbor]

I love this app!! The UI is super fast and the demo is well made. I think either way you’ll find users, tho it is a crowded space - the most important part is whether you personally find it useful I think :)

I think you’d get a lot of the features people are complaining about missing, namely around mobile usage, by having this just be a GUI for editing markdown files. Markdown is amazing, it can definitely store all these states, and can be edited with a plain ol text editor if you don’t have time to write a phone app.

For an example of how powerful “a gui that stores its content as specialize markdown” can be, see obsdidian.

[Sirikon]

This heavily reminds me of TreeSheets https://strlen.com/treesheets/

[joemasilotti]

This is an amazing demo! It's rare to see a live demo this polished. And one that uses the app itself to actually do the demo? Even better. Nice work! I'm excited to see where this goes.

[replwoacause]

I'm not normally a dissenting voice, but this demo was very irritating to me.

[dpcx]

A lot of what I saw in the demo video looks like workflowy.com with a slightly different UI on it. It feels a little faster than workflowy, so that's definitely a bonus.

[lopan]

After buying it and using it for a few hours on Windows: Things I don't like - As you might expect for a version 0.5, there are pretty frequent crashes, which appear to happen mostly when expanding/contracting or hiding/unhiding a root node. Save often.

Things I do like - No installation required. No subscription. It's a bit like Workflowy and a bit like Treesheets (as mentioned previously), but I find it easier to read than either. It's fast.

As someone who suspects that they might have partial ADHD, I love that there are several ways you can put a "spotlight" on what you are working on (depending on the theme) - 1) Selecting more than one line causes other lines to be greyed out; 2) "Highlight" changes the background colour of the current line; and 3) "Focus" causes everything except the immediate branch to be hidden! So good!

Looking forward to the future and more stability. :-)

[enobrev]

This is excellent. Well done! I love the demo.

I've been wanting to work on something similar, with "scriptable tagging" plugins, so that I could, for instance, enter text like [ABC-123], and have it auto-link to a jira or linear ticket. Ideally it would show the state and possibly allow drilling-down into the contents for those tickets as well (expand ticket shows description, status, expand further to show comments, etc)

Likewise with slack links, github links, etc. Ideally those links could potentially also allow interactions with said services (marking done in-app, marks "complete" in ticket app)

I think I'd also want items in which I could write full text entries - but still referenced in the same list-style format, expanding the text as needed.

Anyway - those are the features I personally want in _something_ like this, in a markdown editor, something I end up writing poorly and leave to die on some drive somewhere - wherever.

[polytely]

Feels to me like the default completion green in the demo video is too low contrast on the white background. I would check if the contrast ratio is high enough (it's important for accessibility).

[crdavidson]

Ooh, I've seen this before on the Odin newsletter! https://odin-lang.org/news/newsletter-2022-11/

Exciting to see this get some spotlight. Was it entirely from scratch? Did you build it on SDL or Sokol or something?

[skytrias]

hey colin :D todool is built on top of sdl2 + mixer & stbtruetype for fonts

[eigenvalue]

Looks interesting but really does not handle super high DPI screens well in Windows-- the interface text is extremely tiny and hard to read. You should probably detect the resolution and adjust the default UI text and task text to always be a comfortable size for easy reading.

[skytrias]

dont have high DPI but I enabled the setting

you can scale tasks up/down with ctrl+scroll

UI text scale can be adjusted in the options file - dont have a slider for it

[didgetmaster]

Is this a completely 'off-line' tool or do does it need some kind of connection to a central server? Does it send any of your data over the network or does all your information remain local (i.e. private)?

[skytrias]

yes it's completly offline

the savefile is a .todool file which ppl wanted a json export option

options + theme files are json

[inferense]

This is great! I'm building a developer-first knowledge base with tasks [1] and getting such experience with tasks is quite difficult. Something we're cracking just now. Great job.

[geoelectric]

Well, I guess after years of all the good Todo apps being Mac/iOS, this serves us right! It sounds way interesting, though. I'll have to boot a VM to try this out.

[skytrias]

once i get a mac it should be easy to port

[narag]

Nice job. This looks very much like something I've been doing for some time... years :-)

The thing with this is it's exhilarating to use once it's working. Congrats!

[sublinear]

I thought power users just write nested bullets in a plain text file? It also happens to be valid markdown when you do that.

[itake]

Seems like some neat ideas here. but I am a bit confused who the customer is for this.

I am a software engineer that heavily uses todo tracking apps, but this isn't for me.

I use todoist to manage my life. Critical features are mobile app and scheduling tasks.

I use jira to manage project work. Critical feature is multi-user.

This is desktop only, so I can't use it for my grocery list.

This doesn't seem to let me share tasks with other people to track my progress and delegate work.

I guess if I am a solo dev and I wanted a private system to track my tasks that isn't JIRA, then this is useful?

[skytrias]

Agreed the target audience for now is single users & private only.

I'm currently working on separate collaboration version which will be dumbed down but similar to how google docs / figma work - so you can see other users write and interact live.

[TeMPOraL]

It's definitely useful as a benchmark: it's the fastest, most streamlined task wrangling - and generally, tree-wrangling - UX I've seen so far, seemingly ahead of structured editing tools for Lisp like Paredit, though I'd have to play with Todool to be sure. If its existence generates enough pressure on more mainstream tooling to improve its ergonomics, that'll already be a huge win for the entire space.

[wingerlang]

> I guess if I am a solo dev and I wanted a private system to track my tasks that isn't JIRA, then this is useful?

Are you saying this is a rare thing? I doubt many solo devs use JIRA.

[JoeyBananas]

Did you just reinvent org mode?

[rickstanley]

Would you mind telling what is the underlying rendering engine/framework?

[skytrias]

todool is mostly custom built on top of sdl2, sdl2mixer and stbtruetype.

the renderer does basic batching of commands

[ActionHank]

I did not know itch was also used to sell and distribute software

[pjc50]

Isn't "games" a subset of "software"? :)

[skytrias]

humble store and steam also allow software, epic games store doesnt allow software though

[beepbooptheory]

Looks like it can do about 60% of what Org-mode can do, which is pretty good for apps like these!

[ricardobeat]

This reminds me of https://checkvist.com, which I hope would be used more. It's actually a great replacement for Trello or any other kind of board for smaller projects.

[crispinb]

I've been a paying user of Checkvist for years. It's a a pleasing rarity in the contemporary web software world - a simple useful and reliable keyboard-driven tool with little hype and no world-conquering aspirations. It improves year on year, but at no great velocity. It seems to be entirely the property of a team of 2 who are personally responsive at their user forum (https://discuss.checkvist.com/). I supposed one could call it 'artisanal', but it was that before the term came into regrettable fashion.

[swah]

I also tried using similar tools - Checkvist, Workflowy, Dynalist, Trello... They "stop working for me" after a few days/weeks - probably when I start needing notes on tasks, and tasks on notes...

[crosen99]

That's a good share. OPs project and video are very interesting to me, although the "Introduction to Checkvist" explanation page serving as all in one demo/documentation/trial was for me a much more efficient way to size up the product.

[skytrias]

thanks for sharing, looks similar to https://www.taskpaper.com/ which is mac only

[Dyac]

Seems similar to https://workflowy.com/, which has been around for 12 years and has the same features + more and is prettier.

[mtlynch]

It's a little silly to critique a Show HN for having fewer features and less UI polish than a tool that's had a 12 year head start.

[eps]

There gotta be a rule that Show HN videos must be non-monetized or hosted off YouTube.