An open-source command-line-based task management app. Pretty customisable and extendible, it feels like it should be right up my alley for task management.

Recurrence

Recurring tasks need a due date and a recurrence interval.

Allowed recurrence intervals are:

Colours

TaskWarrior colours are decided through a theme. TaskWarrior comes with a number of themes pre-installed - you can see previews of them here.

If you want to make your own theme, you can simply code it up as a file and source it from your .taskrc. Taskwarrior theme files usually have the .theme extension.

A theme file simply consists of:

1. (Optionally) a precedence rule (which decides how colours get applied when multiple apply).
2. A list of colour rules.

Precedence rule

This looks like:

rule.precedence.color=deleted,completed,active,keyword.,tag.,project.,overdue,scheduled,due.today,due,blocked,blocking,recurring,tagged,uda.

This means that colour rules relating to a task's deleted status will take precedence over all others, completed colour status will take precedence over everything except deleted status, etc.

Colour rules

These look like:

color.completed=gray9

This means that completed tasks will be displayed using the gray9 colour. You can apply rules for:

• TaskWarrior elements, including labels, alternate rows, headers, footnotes, warnings, errors, and debug notes.
• Task states, including completion, deletion, active, recurring, scheduled, blocking/blocked.
• Projects, including colours for specific projects or project groups.
• Tags, including colours for specific tags
• Due status, including tasks with a due date, due today, and overdue
• Reports, including burndowns, histories, and summaries.
• Calendar views
• Misc. other things

The easiest way I've found to encounter all the settings is to explore the source code - for example, here's the no-color theme which has no colours but all the entries, so you can muck about with it.

Installing your custom theme

By default, TaskWarrior stores its database in ~/.task, so I just made a directory ~/.task/themes and stored my theme(s) in there. Then, in ~/.taskrc, I just link to it:

include ~/.task/themes/mytheme.theme

What colours can you use?

You can find the full like with task color.

External links

TaskWarrior.org

Official webpage.

Tagged items

📯 Omnifocus → Taskwarrior

27 April 2025

After more than a decade using OmniFocus, I'm shifting to TaskWarrior (I think). Here's how I did it.