pytasknc

A Python ncurses application for Taskwarrior, originally based on tasknc.

Background

Taskwarrior is a command-line task & todo list manager. It's a wonderful tool with a robust ecosystem. In fact you can browse the many tools available - like a web UI and more.

One of those available tools is tasknc. It is a solid little tool, but nearly immediately I wanted to customize it in a way not supported by its configuration and I didn't really want to dig into the plethora of C code. Python is perfect here with its built-in support for ncurses.

There is an existing project called taskhud, but for me it had these issues:

• It didn't work
• There's no pypi package

Plus, I have been wanting an excuse to get experience with ncurses for the sake of another project: polecat.

Dependencies

This project has one requirement: Python 3. Python 2 is not supported.

Installation

Install using pip. Note that since you must use Python 3, you might need to use the pip3 command, depending on your system:

pip install pytasknc

Usage

pytasknc

Design

I believe this project is fairly unique in its design, at least as far as an ncurses application goes. I was heavily inspired by the reagent Clojure library.

For one, the application state is immutable. The models module contains the full state necessary to draw the screen and is made up of namedtuple objects, which are copied and modified whenever some action is taken on the screen.

You can see the actions module contains the code to respond to any action the user may take. An action function is one which takes the current state and returns a new state.

The draw module then renders a state into what you see on the screen. In fact, it does a basic diff (sorta like React) in order to update the minimal amount of screen necessary. If the code were to always perform a full draw of the screen, the screen often flickers.