ttm -- the Tiny Task Manager

What?

ttm is a very small and simple Perl program which acts as a command-line operated task manager.

Why?

I got fed up of writing lists of jobs on pieces of paper and then watching the piece of paper get messier and messier as I highlighted important jobs, crossed out jobs I'd done or which were once important but no longer were so had to be rewritten etc. etc. ... Of course I would always end up rewriting the whole damn list in a new order. Ugh.

So I decided I needed a task manager that had all of the following properties:

very memory-efficient and fast (including loading time; I didn't want to have it running all the time on my memory-deficient laptop)
highly customisable
a task can be in any number of categories
arbitrary (user-defined) task categories, priorities, statuses, and any other properties I wanted to attach to tasks
ability to list entries from the task database according to any of the task properties
let me use my favourite editor to edit the task

Believe it or not, I couldn't find a single piece of software already around which fulfilled all of these criteria. Well, as Eric Raymond wrote, every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch. So I wrote my own.

(It satisfies the `highly customisable' bits because if I don't like the way it does something, I can just change the code. And through its simplicity it's easy to add new features. Bit of a cheat, I know, but what do I care ... ?)

What? (part II)

All tasks are stored in a single GDBM file using the MLDBM and Storable Perl modules to provide the hierarchical structure. Any single operation on the database is through one invocation of the program. For example:

ttm will list all pending tasks (subject to certain conditions).
ttm add will fire up your favourite editor and add the new task when you've finished editing.
ttm edit task_id will fire up your favourite editor on the existing task with id task_id and commit changes to the task when you've finished editing.
ttm categories will list all currently used categories.

Type ttm -h for more help. Note that the commands like add and edit above can be abbreviated, so if you also tell your shell to alias t to ttm (highly recommended), you'll end up typing things like t, t a and t e 31, which requires very little effort indeed.

Where?

Here's the source code to the program. There's also a to do list for features I want to add. Help with these is very welcome! Finally, there's a log of all recent changes, which might be up to date if you're lucky.

How?

Make sure you have Perl 5.004 or later installed. See www.perl.com if you haven't.
Make sure you have the MLDBM and Storable modules installed. If not, get them from CPAN (typing perl -MCPAN -e shell as root is usually the easiest way of doing this).
Put the ttm script somewhere on your $PATH. Or even not on your path; I don't mind. So long as you know how to run it.
Run it (try the -h option for help). Hopefully the help will be sufficient to enable you to do most things, although I really should write proper documentation someday. Hmm. If in doubt, you can always read the source ...

Feedback

As with all my software, all suggestions / bug reports / patches (unified or context diff only please) are very welcome; please contact me by e-mail.