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It's a simple terminal-based fully-interactive reminder tool. It is not for everybody, but for the folks with a software engineering background who have to manage many day-to-day to-do items (like meeting minutes, 1:1 updates with their team-members, reminders about ad-hoc tasks, etc.) and want the speed of the command-line to organize all this in an efficient way.
Apart from being fully-interactive and terminal-based, the other major features it comes with are:
- Easy to categorize tasks (referred as "notes") with tags (🏷 ).
- List and manage tasks (change status, update text, add comments, update due-date, etc) of a given tag.
- Each task can be associated with multiple tags, and so show up under all of its tags.
- A given task:
- can be updated (📝) with its text, and also can be enhanced with time-stamped comments (💬); so that you can track how and when the progress happened
- can be marked done (✅), suspended (💤), or pending (⏰); marking it as "done" makes it disappear (soft-delete), and marking it as "suspended" suspendes it for now
- can be associated with due-date (📅); tasks with upcoming deadlines automatically show up under the "Approaching Due Date" option under Main Menu
- can be set as "main" or non-main (incidental); tasks marked as "main", show up under dedicated view Main Notes
- Full-text search (🔎) among all tasks.
- Tag-groups for grouping tags, for managing priority-levels (⬆️ ⬇️) or workflow-stages. For example, a task (note) can be part of only one tag out of tags (for example,
priority-low,priority-medium, andpriority-high) part of same tag-group. - Provides you with "Register Basic Tags" functionality to seed basic tags which have special meaning to the workflow.
- All of your data (📋) remains with only you; so, any of your sensitive information burried inside any of your tasks, doesn't leave your machine.
- The data remains in a human-readable and usable format. This is useful when you require to edit your file manually.
- Allows your to Look Ahead whole year in advance.
- Easily take time-stamped backups (💾).
- Provides you a way to easily add/remove tags to any of the existing tasks.
- Sync to Google Calendar.
Nothing is hidden (except your data from rest of the world)! The tool is Open Source. You are welcome to use, recommend features, raise bugs, and enhance it further.
The Screencast of Basic Features can provide you with gist of how the tool looks like and its basic functionality (but there is a lot more that you can do with it).
Once you invoke the tool (for example, by using the alias reminder), you are presented with its Main Menu. Use Up-Arrow and Down-Arrow keys to navigate up and down:
You may like to take a good look at the options of the Main Menu (as shown above), as we'll be talking about it through out this guide.
Also note that you can choose an option by pressing Enter key, and use Ctrl-c to jump from any nested level to one level up (towards the the Main Menu).
In reminder, the tags are the main method of categorizing tasks. When you first time start the app, the tag list is empty, but you can use the "Register Basic Tags" option (the option pointed out by the selection-cursor in the above figure) to register basic tags (as listed in the figure below). Then, you can use the "List Stuff" option to list them out (as shown below figure).
As we'll see, the "List Stuff" option is the most frequently used option in this list. It lets you add tags, add tasks (also referred to as "notes") under those tags, update those tasks; so almost 90% of use-cases.
Now, from within the "List Stuff" option, you can add a new tag using "Add Tag" (as shown at the bottom of the above figure) or choose an existing tag to add a task to it. For example, the following figure shows state of the UI when you select a tag (such as "priority-urgent") to add a new task under it:
On selecting a tag (navigating to the tag and hitting Enter key), all of its tasks show up as a list of selectable items. You can then navigate to a given task and hit Enter key to bring up a menu to update the task (it lets you change its text, add comments, mark it as pending, mark it as done, add due-date, change its existing tag(s)). The following figures shows you how this menu looks like:
Note: The "Approaching Due Date" shows you tasks that require your immediate attention. In general, tasks with a due-date in upcoming 7 days start showing up under this option (and remain there until they are marked done). The tags "repeat-monthly" and "repeat-annually" are special; tasks tagged with them also show up under the "Approaching Due Date" option close to their due-dates in their respective monthly and annual frequencies. These rules are also listed under "Approaching Due Date" option for a reference.
With time, you will add more tags and hundreds of tasks under them. These stats will show up on top of your main-menu screen (as shown in previous image):
Here, the status states that there are currently 21 tags, a total of 164 tasks, and out of them 80 tasks are in the "pending" state. The tasks marked as "done" disappear (but not deleted, and will still show up under "Done Notes" and in Search results).
The "Search Notes" option lets you perform a full-text search (with each task's status, text and its comments) through all tasks. You can use [done] as search text to filter only tasks which are done, similarly use [pending] for tasks which are pending.
The result list updates as you add or delete characters in the search field (without hitting Enter-key):
You can navigate to a search entry (a task) and hit Enter key to bring up the menu to update the task (similar to how we updated tasks under a tag).
Additionally, from the Main Menu:
- use the "Exit" option to exit the tool. You can come back it to later from where you left off (that is, with your data intact)
- use the "Create Backup" option to create manual time-stamped backup of your data file (on host machine)
The easiest way is to utilise Homebrew (macOS) or LinuxBrew (Linux) package management system. Once installed simply issue the following command:
brew tap goyalmunish/reminder
brew install goyalmunish/reminder/reminderTo upgrade to latest reminder version:
brew upgrade goyalmunish/reminder/reminderThe brew tap is maintained at goyalmunish/homebrew-reminder.
Refer Other Ways of Running.
As you are owner and also the end user, you would need to follow instructions on Google's official doc of Set up your environment to:
- Enable the API
- Save credentials to
~/calendar_credentials.jsonfile
Check Issues to track bugs and request for new features.
Check Development Guide.