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

vikunja.io

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

#81

Post by flakeoil »

progval wrote: post #75
flakeoil wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't you have one main task which describes the overall task and then it has a list with checkboxes that has links to the other tasks it depends on? When one subtask is done, you check it off. "Ideally then, given all these tasks and their dependencies, what should I work on next?" I doubt a system can automatically propose the ideal task to work on anyway. There will be many tasks equally important and which are…

> Couldn't you have one main task which describes the overall task and then it has a list with checkboxes that has links to the other tasks it depends on? That only works for trees of tasks, ie. when a task is a dependency of at most one other task. Imagine you have two high-level tasks: "repair the chair" and "repair the computer", which both depends on the task "buy a screwdriver". Without support for DAGs of tasks…

I get your point.

In that case I would have created a task "buy a screwdriver" with a relatively high priority or scheduled before the other tasks and maybe link to or comment about the other tasks as motivation to why the screwdriver is needed.

In practice, when using basic to-do apps like the one mentioned here for simpler projects such as re-build the living room or a one-man software project or just some around-the-house projects then I think a DAG is a bit overkill and complicated. You would also need to remember to connect the screwdriver dependency to any new task that depends on it and also avoid creating a new duplicate "buy screwdriver" task as you did not know/find the already existing one.

For projects such as "build the next generation 747", for sure something DAG like is needed.

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

#82

Post by flakeoil »

koheripbal wrote: post #79
yewenjie wrote: post #76

Has anyone found a personal productivity /todo app that - gets out of your way - doesn't feel like a chore even after months of use - has some sort of intelligence built-in ? IMO all apps I've tried so far feel good in the beginning and then start to become an annoyance.

I use a simple document with daily sections. Simple. I've been using it for three years straight. I started using simple markup, then switched to orgmode. Although, I'm still mostly just adding a day to each day on a single document. Keeps me focused

I like EasyOrg [0] and enjoy using the Calendar view. I have been using it more or less daily for a couple of years now, mainly keeping track of personal projects. It's orgmode based.

Adds a bit more intelligence and structure than a regular text file which I used some years ago. I feel EasyOrg makes it a bit easier to work with the org-files than Emacs, but that's just my personal view, and it's also possible to switch between the two.

[0] https://easyorgmode.com.

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

#83

Post by yewenjie »

koheripbal wrote: post #79
yewenjie wrote: post #76

Has anyone found a personal productivity /todo app that - gets out of your way - doesn't feel like a chore even after months of use - has some sort of intelligence built-in ? IMO all apps I've tried so far feel good in the beginning and then start to become an annoyance.

I use a simple document with daily sections. Simple. I've been using it for three years straight. I started using simple markup, then switched to orgmode. Although, I'm still mostly just adding a day to each day on a single document. Keeps me focused

I love org-mode and have been using it for years now. However, these days I feel an increasing need for a mobile client and something that will give me intelligent reminders of things.

Last time I checked there was no sane solution for having org-mode on mobile that is in sync with your desktop. Yes, I did try Syncthing with Orgzly.

- How do you move tasks between days, weeks etc.?

- How do you view and/or edit tasks on mobile?

- What is your workflow like?

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

#84

Post by bioemerl »

kolaente wrote: post #71
bioemerl wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's cool to hear from you and see you're planning on working on a lot of this. > 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…

> 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. Gotcha. Thanks for the input! > 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 da…

> Crontab sounds nice but I probably can't give that to someone who has never used it.

Oh, no no, it's used in the background and the interface is nothing like it. Let me send you a screenshot of what the editor looks like. Feel free to steal it.

https://snipboard.io/Vsk60N.jpg

https://snipboard.io/c7wrKe.jpg

All this guy does is modify a crontab string in the background.

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

#85

Post by bioemerl »

jeremycarter wrote: post #65
bioemerl wrote: post #28

I'm biased. I'm making a tool that's kind of like this one. Please keep that in mind, because I'm about to give a whole bunch of criticism here. First things first, the UX and UI is really neat and there's lots of really good design and thought put into how fast the app is and how well it is handling a whole bunch of users. I was sitting in there with everyone in hacker news creating tasks and it was keeping up amazi…

What's your product? I'd love to test it.

Not public sadly, if it ever is I'll come back to you in a year or two when there's something to show.

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

#86

Post by fgrsnau »

kolaente wrote: post #69
fgrsnau wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Initially I was also interested in this. There is the staticpath option in the backend config. You can point it to the directory of the frontend files. Theoretically, both the backend and the frontend could be served by the builtin webserver. Unfortunately, for this to work most frontend URLs must get rewritten/rerouted to /index.html and this does not seem to be implemented. Shouldn't be too complicated though.

Where did you find that option? I've never heard of any setting like that and I built the thing...

It's even documented and mentions the idea of setting it to the frontend directory: https://vikunja.io/docs/config-options/#staticpath

By the way, thanks for creating this software. I especially like the clean split between the API server and the frontend. Interaction feels almost like a local application.

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

#87

Post by cjbprime »

michaelsalim wrote: post #44
TeMPOraL wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. To me, it seems like a weird market blind spot. Most of the tools in this space can't even do a proper tree - typically they limit you to 2-4 levels, like "project", "task", "subtask" and "checklist". The few that don't, stick to the tree model, even though work naturally structures itself into a DAG. From the other end, I know MS Project has pretty much all the things you need, but has questionable UX, is quit…

I made Recall[0] which is all about this. Managing tasks using a tree structure (like folder/files, no level limit). And dependency representation with DAG graphs. Give it a try, you might like it. Unfortunately the project is currently paused since i can't figure out how to make it work financially (you can still use it though). The space is really crowded and most people don't really think about dependencies, so it…

I wonder if there's a site where someone trying to work out whether to continue a business could post how much money they would accept to instead open source it, and then that amount could be crowdfunded by its users, or just people (this would be me in this case, I guess) who aren't current users but think it looks like it would be a valuable contribution to the world.

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

#88

Post by jeremycarter »

bioemerl wrote: post #85
jeremycarter wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your product? I'd love to test it.

Not public sadly, if it ever is I'll come back to you in a year or two when there's something to show.

That would be great. I just really liked reading your feedback!

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

#89

Post by TeMPOraL »

lonelyasacloud wrote: post #80
TeMPOraL wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. To me, it seems like a weird market blind spot. Most of the tools in this space can't even do a proper tree - typically they limit you to 2-4 levels, like "project", "task", "subtask" and "checklist". The few that don't, stick to the tree model, even though work naturally structures itself into a DAG. From the other end, I know MS Project has pretty much all the things you need, but has questionable UX, is quit…

> This. To me, it seems like a weird market blind spot. Most of the tools in this space can't even do a proper tree - typically they limit you to 2-4 levels, like "project", "task", "subtask" and "checklist". The few that don't, stick to the tree model, even though work naturally structures itself into a DAG. I did wonder that myself. But having tried implementing, I'd wager that deep many-to-many parent-child relati…

> I'd wager that deep many-to-many parent-child relationships are not directly visible more often is because no one has figured out good paradigms [1] to surface the functionality in a way that users would want to use most of the time

I suspect that might be a big part of the reason. I believe [0] that one big change that happens when you "upgrade" from a tree to a DAG is that you lose the ability to visualize your model in a compact and direct plaintext form

Sequences you can print an item per line, or separate by commas. Trees you can visualize with indentation, possibly decorating with some form of arrows. But DAGs seem to require you either use indirect references[1] (or duplication, which is just a more verbose and limited form of references), or give up and start drawing arrows and boxes. There's a qualitative jump in difficulty here - you (or rather, the software) needs to start thinking about layout, which is pretty much a non-issue with trees.

The biggest problems are with the evolution of the data structure. Trees and sequences don't "jump around" when you add or remove single nodes - edits cause, at worst small local rearrangement, and the rest of the tree is shifted to make/take space. DAGs are the first stage in this "from sequences to graphs" progression at which any single edit could force you to re-layout the entire visualization to keep it readable.

I have one nit though:

> And it (...) also needs to be usable on the limited screen estate of a mobile phone?

This is true now, but it wasn't true just a few years ago. Where are all the products from the last decade, that didn't have the "design for smartphones" constraint?

--

[0] - I strongly suspect this to be a mathematical fact, but I haven't encountered a proof of it.

[1] - If you want to keep parents next to their children, you're almost always forced to start doing things like:

  #1=Parent1 ----v
  Parent2  ---> Child1

  Parent3 ---> Child2
           #1# --^
... which kills readability, as now the reader has to keep a cache of those labels and dereference pointers in their head. If, instead of references (like #1#) you just duplicate the node (e.g. write "Parent1" again), the reader still has to keep a mental map of which nodes are represented multiple times in the text, and which are just similarly named.

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

#90

Post by TeMPOraL »

thijser wrote: post #78
TeMPOraL wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. To me, it seems like a weird market blind spot. Most of the tools in this space can't even do a proper tree - typically they limit you to 2-4 levels, like "project", "task", "subtask" and "checklist". The few that don't, stick to the tree model, even though work naturally structures itself into a DAG. From the other end, I know MS Project has pretty much all the things you need, but has questionable UX, is quit…

Have you tried Trilium ( https://github.com/zadam/trilium )? It's a generic note storage (with a DAG based model) that's very extensible and comes with a demo task manager implementation: https://github.com/zadam/trilium/wiki/Task-manager

Thanks for the link, I haven't seen it.

Skimming through their Wiki, it looks like a tree-oriented outliner with a link graph - i.e. a similar model to what Roam, Obsidian, Logseq or org-mode (especially when paired with org-roam) offers.

This is as close as I've seen graphs at the UI level to hit mainstream, and the extreme hype generated around this class of tools (and Zettelkasten) when Roam showed up was interesting to watch - people reacted to this as if it was pure magic.

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