Vikunja – Open-source, self-hostable to-do app

Thanks for the in-depth comment!

> But my first impression using this is that it's going to need a lot more work on the depth of the features rather than the breath.

> but when you add little features like that instead of bigger systems, you're going to find that you get lots of people wanting to add new little features to fit their use cases.

Oh definitely. My method until this point was to build a bunch of stuff to a) have what I personally need and b) see what other people need. In this year the focus will be on going deeper on things that work and are actively used. The task detail UX is something like that which needs some work and something I'm not satisfied with. But I can wholly agree with what you said about lots of people wanting to add new little features.

> Imagine having progress that is tied to the number of check boxes I've checked off, something that's not another manual thing that I have to click and keep track of.

The progress option is indeed not great and is likely going away in the future. There is a little circle indicator on a task with the number of total vs done items on a task checklist, similar to how github does it. Is that what you meant?

> Taking my trash out happens every Tuesday. If I were to want to abandon my current system to use this app I would no longer be able to do that.

You can actually do that. It's just not as straight forward as you might think (and that's a problem): you'll need to create a task with a due date of next Tuesday and a repeating schedule of every week / every 7 days.

There has been a bit of debate recently about the repeating option lately with a few good points made so it's highly likely there will be changes to this in the future.

Out of curiosity, what are you building?

I start with a template docker-compose yaml that contains the barebones: network settings, labels for Traefik (eg. Let’s Encrypt config), placeholders for the image/container name, volumes, env variables, etc. I fill this in based on the container I want to setup. Many self-hosted apps provide example docker-compose configurations - I often just merge them with my template by hand. It’s usually just a couple of lines.

I edit the files in vscode (but directly over ssh). Not a huge fan of editing YAML in the terminal.

Then, I execute an aliased command that goes something like this:

  docker-compose down ; docker-compose pull && docker-compose up -d && docker-compose logs -f

Some repeating tasks have to happen on a fixed schedule, e.g. put the trash out every Tuesday night.

But many (most?) of my repeating tasks a) have quite a bit of wiggle room, and b) the scheduling of the next occurrence should be based on when I actually complete the previous occurrence.

So the way that application worked is you'd create tasks and say it could happen as early as this date, it would ideally happen on this date, and it must happen no later than this date. You'd also tell it the ideal time between occurrences. The "priority" of the task would automatically change as you move through that window of dates. When you mark the task as complete, the next earliest/ideal/latest dates would be based on the ideal time between occurrences.

Watering plants is a good example. Let's say I want to water my houseplants every 8 days. I could water them 7 days after I last watered them, but I could also be lazy and wait until 9 or 10 days. If I water on day 10, that doesn't mean I should water again in 6 days (which is what a strict 'repeat every 8 days' task manager would make me do); even though I'm "late" I still want to wait the ideal time until the next occurrence. [I'm just making this up, don't take houseplant care advice from me...although most of my plants live nice long lives.]

tl;dr: The ideal repeating task scheduling should allow for a window of time, not a specific day, in which a task should be completed, and the scheduling of the next window of time should be based on when I actually marked the previous one as complete.

There’s also a way of organizing tasks on a Kanban. It looks a lot like Trello.

> There is a little circle indicator on a task with the number of total vs done items on a task checklist, similar to how github does it. Is that what you meant?

Yes and no - yes in the sense that that's basically what I'm talking about, but no in the sense that when I saw that button I was looking more for "a system of progress" - a way to configure what counts as progress, maybe? A progress bar of some sort, with different ranges. Something which acts more of a customizable tool than a single input field.

Maybe something that lets you define weights to what counts as progress, or a number of days of work you expect things to take, or something of that form? This isn't so much me saying X feature is a good idea, but to describe what the mismatch was for me between expectation and result.

> you'll need to create a task with a due date of next Tuesday and a repeating schedule of every week / every 7 days.

Oof. I should have guessed that as a possibility. That's one of those fun workarounds you only get to know when you designed the system or get really invested in it and have to work around the flaws.

I used Crontab (and making it so that you can't open a template twice) to handle scheduling - putting a UI over it - it's been pretty darn good, but crontab also has some serious flaws in it - mostly around things like repeating tasks once every X > 5 days. For hourly/monthly/day-of-month and day-of-week, it works very well though.

> Out of curiosity, what are you building?

It's hard to describe or show because it's a personal project with no presence online. I'll focus on the differences from Vikunja. My system:

Focuses on repeating tasks first - it basically assumes everything inside of it will be a repeating task. I made the *mistake* of making "repeating templates" the first class citizen, so you don't create goals, you create templates and then use those templates to open up a "todo item".

Focuses on much "smaller grain" tasks - things that you might do multiple times a day. Lets say, getting up every 3 hours while you're at work.

It's more "building habit" focused than it is project focused. Scenarios for its use might be ensuring that you water your plants every day, and having the app force you to upload pictures of the plant in order to say "I'm done" - then you can go back into your history and see your plant grow over time. You might set up a task that will force you to sit quietly for 10 minutes every day. You might set up a list of exercises in one of the templates and the app will pull 2 random exercises every time that task cycles open.

Is mobile first, which is super important for day to day data entry. There are no left/right bar systems because I assume you're going to use it on your phone and it's designed to be responsive. It works on the desktop, but it's not designed for the desktop.

It's built around one-user. It wasn't built considering multi-user situations, although I want to be able to have that work as well - another mistake I've made creating it, because I'm going to have to redesign half the stupid thing to handle multi user scenarios and how to do permissions. Families and businesses will find this important, so it's a really really essential feature I just didn't bother with because I don't use it.