A Lightweight Task Outliner
Being ambitious is good, however tackling a big task can be daunting. How does one break the cycle of procrastination?
Too big a goal, if you can break it down into easily chewable tasks you’re half-way done! A simple list is often enough to get you started.
Taskan is a lightweight task outliner that organizes and auto-formats your projects in tasks, notes and tags. It takes its inspiration from Hog Bay’s TaskPaper in staying plain-text based with no vendor lock-in. You can always open files saved in Taskan in any text editor including TaskPaper.
Taskan extends other plain-text based outliners such as TaskPaper by focusing on usability. It comes bundled as a handy menu bar application with an easily identifiable checkbox icon. Clicking on the menu bar icon opens the most recent document you were working on. If you prefer keyboard-driven navigation and editing, you can also enable Vim mode in the Preferences Editor pane.
Hats off to Jesse Grosjean for developing TaskPaper. Fitting this kind of performance in such a streamlined application is an amazing feat. The more I worked on this project, the greater my admiration grew for Jesse.
Taskan is still brittle. It currently lacks its kan(ban) part and the undo stack is partially broken. So don’t use it for anything serious yet ;)
This first beta release is mostly meant to assess the general interest before diving into a more involved fine-tuning of the idea. It’s more of a proof of concept than a true beta. Consider giving it a star on GitHub if you like the concept.