An Obsidian plugin to make working with tasks a pleasure (hopefully anyway).
If you're like me and have tasks dotted all around your vault, then CardBoard is built
to help you keep track of them. Daily notes support built in, plus you can use #tags to
define custom boards.
This has not been accepted (yet - submitted Oct 31st) as an official plugin, so you will have to use the v.handy obsidian42 BRAT plugin to install it, or manually install from the releases page, or you can try a self-build - see the contributing doc).
When installed, you can launch the plugin:
- using the icon in the app ribbon (see below), or
- using the Command Pallete command (which allows you to open a specific board).
If you have no boards defined, you should get a dialog asking you to add a new board. There are 2 types of board:
- Date based: looks like the main screenshot above.
- Tag based: uses tags to define the columns (you need to include tags on your tasks for this to work).
Name and configure your board and you are good to go.
Any task in your vault can appear as a card in a column on a board. In order to do this, it must:
- Be in a markdown file.
- Not be indented.
- Have the format:
- [ ] Task title.
What appears on the card depends on what your task looks like:
- Anything that is indented under a task will appear in the body of the task.
- Indented tasks will appear as subtasks (all subtasks are grouped together).
- Indented text will appear as notes.
- #tags on the line of the task (or any subtasks) will appear at the top of the card.
- Due date (if given) will appear at the bottom of the card.
So, if you had the following in one of your markdown files:
- [ ] run erands @due(2021-10-30)
- [x] do shopping #town
- [ ] wash car #home/outside
- [ ] cook dinner #home/kitchen
perhaps I should look up some [[example_tasks/recipes|recipes]] first
- [ ] do something with a long title that will truncate when displayed
- [ ] go to bed
It will look something like this on a card on your board:
If you mark an item as complete on the board it will be marked as completed in the markdown (and vice-versa). If you mark as complete on the board, a completion timestamp is appended to the task:
- [x] Task title @completed(2021-10-30T13:57:48)
If you have subtasks and the parent task is tagged as an autocomplete task then the main task will be marked as complete when you tick off the final subtask:
- [ ] Task title @autocomplete(true)
- [ ] Do this first
- [ ] Do this next
- [ ] Finally do this and you are done
You can delete a task using the trash icon on the card. This will not actually delete
the task from your vault, it simply surrounds it with markdown <del> tags:
<del>- [x] Task title</del>
Click on the edit icon to open the file containing the task. Cmd (or Ctrl on windows) hover over the icon for the normal Obsidian hover preview.
The current behaviour for the different columns is:
- Completed: has the most recently completed at the top (assuming they were marked as complete using the checkbox on the board)
- Future, Today, Tags: these are sorted by due date and then alphabetically within this
- other columns are sorted alphabetically
I am not convinced that this is the best strategy so this may well change in a future release.
If you like to apply different styles to different tags, this is now possible
(thank you @darthmachina). Tags now have a class that reflects the tag name.
So if you have a tag #foo/bar you will be able to style it with your favorite
color for foobars using:
div.tag-foo-bar
You will get the best out of these if you are using the (core) Daily Notes plugin as any tasks you place on a daily note will be assigned to the day of the note.
You can also assign a date to any task using the format:
- [ ] My task @due(2021-10-31)
These will appear in the Today column above any any tasks that are actually
due today.
The idea being that it will get steadily more annoying to see what you were planning to do today if you have a lot of incomplete tasks from previous days, (hopefully) encouraging you to do something about them; like do them or move them to a future date if you want to schedule them later.
If you give your tasks tags, you can use these to set up a tag-board. So if you
have the tags #project1/backlog, #project1/triaged, project1/blocked, #project1/doing,
you can define a board that shows tasks tagged with these in separate columns:
If you specify a tag with a trailing / then the column will contain all subtags of the tag.
Plugin settings are accessible from the plugin view itself, via the settings icon above the board to the left of the tabs. You can:
- Create new boards (using the + icon next to BOARDS).
- Configure your boards.
- Delete any boards you no longer need.
- Uses the settings from the Daily Notes plugin, NOT periodic notes (will fix soon).
- Might not work that great on large vaults (as it parses all markdown files at startup).
- Might not be great on mobile (see previous, plus I haven't made the interface mobile friendly - yet).
If the way that this works isn't for for you, there are plenty of other fabulous plugins you can use for task management in Obsidian. Kanban and Tasks are the most popular. There are others too, see the list on the wonderful roundup site.
How this will work is still evolving, but I am accepting pull requests, so if you would like to help out then you are welcome. Please see the contributing doc for more info and guidance on how to get a dev environment set up and running.
- Bugs/suggestions/feature requests - github issues.
- Questions/discussions - github discussions