My colourful plaintext to-do list

I have probably tried more alternatives for to-do lists than anything. And while there’s a lot of good options out there, I really don’t need all the bells and whistles that most comes with.

Then there’s the syncing issue as well. I haven’t really found an application that I both like and that supports syncing with my phone in some easy and sane way.

So, one day I decided to try out the plaintext route. Plaintext is after all one of my favourite things in this world! After a little bit of tinkering I settled on the workflow of simply using my editor Vim and then Supercat, which works like cat but supports colourised output via regular expression.

The command I use to view the document is $ spc -c <config> <document> and I have put it in a small script for easy access:

#!/bin/bash

file="$HOME/Documents/todo.md"
spc="spc -c $HOME/.config/supercat/markdown"

case $1 in
    ls)
        echo ""
        $spc $file
        echo ""
        ;;
    edit)
        vim $file
        ;;
esac

My configuration for Supercat looks like this:

# spc configuration file
#
# col - color (blk, red, grn, yel, blu, mag, cya, whi)
#
#   a - color attribute (console_code)
#         ' ':normal          (0)
#         '-':normal          (0)
#         'b':bold            (1)
#         'u':underline       (4)
#         'r':reverse-video   (7)
#         'k':blink           (5)
#
#   n - number of matches,  (' ':1, '1'-'9':1-9, '0':all)
#
#   t - pattern type
#         'c':chars     (strchr)
#         's':string    (strstr)
#         't':regexp    (regcomp) (convert 10-digit unix time to MMDDHHMMSS)
#         'r':regexp    (regcomp)
#         ' ':regexp    (regcomp)
#
#                    col a n t pattern
#################### ### # # # ########################################
H1                   yel   1   (^#\s.*$)
H2                   mag   1   (^##\s.*$)
Prio High            red   1   ##(\sHigh)
Prio Medium          yel   1   ##(\sMedium)
Prio Low             grn   1   ##(\sLow)
Numbered list item   blu   1   ([0-9]\.)
List item            blu   1   (^-)
List item            blu   1   (^\*)
Highligt             cya       \*(.*?)\*

I then use Syncthing to sync the document with my phone and on my phone I use an application called Editor (which is available on F-droid here) to view and edit the document.

I have also added a shortcut on my home screen that opens the file directly in Editor for quick and easy access.

I understand that this might not be a good solution for all, but me personally like the simplicity of it. :)