hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr4495.txt

Episode: 4495
Title: HPR4495: An introduction to Taskwarrior
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4495/hpr4495.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-11-22 15:02:35

---

This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4495 for Friday the 24th of October 2025.
Today's show is entitled, An Introduction to Task Warrior.
It is the first show by a new host candy can order and is about 4 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag, the summary is, going over what makes task warrior unique and
why I use it.
Hello, it's candy cane order, that is how you pronounce it.
Task Warrior, the really cool program I've been using for quite a while, it's a big complex
like most CLI apps, that has a lot of custom ability.
It makes task warrior unique and my personal go to, beside the ease of frifting, is the
unique way that it treats tasks.
Every task is assigned an urgent v-nigger that starts at 0 and can be added to from different
sources.
The default view also starts by the number, so it can be used to categorize how important
a task is.
Each source of urgency is given a value between 0 and 1 and a coefficient.
Each source is multiplied together and added to the total urgency.
For an example, the due date urgency source had a coefficient of 12 at a fault, and the
value gets closer to 1, the closer the due date of this task is, bumping it up in a list.
At that reference, in my own task warrior setup, which is without the vanilla, tasks can
barely get past 20 urgency, so due date is often a pre-large factor in sorting.
Alright, so sorting is done by some weird number instead of the standard of sorting by due
date.
So what?
So, you can customize the heck out of it.
Every single sort of urgency coefficient can be modified at will through the task urgency
file, what the age coefficient to be more powerful than date, want tasks with a certain
tag, be boosted to the top, it's just a single line, it's very simple and powerful,
and easily lets you define how important tasks are to you.
The custom and the ability extend to creating your own task fields too, these fields called
UDA, you either define the attribute, can be defined in a task or see through a few lines
as well.
These unfortunately don't show up on reports by default, so you have to either modify
the default report to include these columns or create your own reports, but they are extremely
useful for further control of the urgency value.
At an example, I have an estimated time at UDA on my setup, with a possible value of
the 5 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, and long, 5 minutes, 30 minutes, and 1 hour
give to us around 2.5, 1.5, and 0.5 to urgency, respectively, while 2 hours and long have
negative urgency coefficients.
That way, tasks that are either too messy, flow up to the top, and they can get them over
with quickly.
Task warrior also has some simple and effective ways to manipulate how often tasks appear,
so it's due, occur, scheduled, and weight attributes.
View is the fixed laboratory, tasks can urgency the closest to the due date it gets, and
the further boost if they are overdue.
The way urgency works in task warrior is somewhat unique.
In essence, it creates an invisible template task that is copied to a child task for each
recurring event.
To recurrence field, take the date range like 7 days or 1 months, and once a due date
for the task passes, it creates a new task with each date field offset that many days.
It is a bit finicky, but if long is outmodified apparent task, it works well enough.
It's scheduled is also extremely simple, since the just boosts the urgent the by a lot
once the date passes.
Finally, there's weight.
Weight is useful since the outright highest task until the date listed on it passes.
It's a great way to fantasize tasks temporarily, or experiment with parents too, they make
a task appear every weekday, only over the weekend.
Weight is also extremely useful with this special date of the Sunday, which is defined as
New Year's, New Year's, 9999.
Putting a task with weight Sunday is the usual way to softly to task.
I personally use weight Sunday as a kind of bucket list, rescuing that I want to do
Sunday, but aren't immediate enough to put on to the main list.
I've mentioned before, it is also extremely eb-descript.
It offers special commands for person with bash, and even offers an extra command that
puts out every single task as a json for eb-perthing.
It also offers hooks for running command after any action, using class on scripts.
Finally, it has the benefit of using contained and plain text and not running constantly, it
makes the eb-to-export import and recover tasks easily.
Please check the shows description for the full task warrior documentation.
This is far from a complete overview, and I'm skimming over most of it.
So I'm not completely sure if I'm going to be doing another show, but yeah.
You have been listening to Hecker Public Radio at Hecker Public Radio does work.
Today's show was contributed by a HBR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcasts, click on our contribute link to find out how
easy it leads.
The hosting for HBR has been kindly provided by an honesthost.com, the Internet Archive
and our sync.net.
On this otherwise stated, today's show is released under Creative Commons, Attribution 4.0
International License.