Smarterware

Interact with Google Apps at the Command Line

Having a ball playing around with the just-released GoogleCL tool, which offers command line access to Google Calendar, contacts, Docs, Picasa, Blogger, and YouTube. With Python-based GoogleCL installed, you can do things such as list today's events on your GCal right in the terminal, like so:

$ google calendar today title
Coffee with Michael and Samir
Dozing off
Lunch at Flingers

Instant use case: Add echo "Next 24 hours:";google calendar today title to your ~/.bash_profile file to see what you've got scheduled for the day when you launch a new Terminal window. Some more GoogleCL fun inside.

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Happy Birthday to the Shell Script That Runs My Life

On May 12, 2006, I hacked together my first bash script that was more than a dozen lines and published it on Lifehacker. todo.sh manipulated a todo.txt file at the command line using grep, tail, head, sort, and cat: all the shell-based text tools that I knew and loved. Back then, in Lifehacker's heyday, I was obsessed with the simplicity and portability of text files, mostly because Danny O'Brien featured them front and center in his original life hacks talk.

Since then, Todo.txt CLI has grown into a legitimate open source project with dozens of contributors, hundreds of people on the mailing list, regression tests, custom add-ons, and a Python fork. This script has literally run my life since 2006, but using it hasn't been its greatest value--the collaborative development experience has.

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Projectview Lists Your Todo.txt by Project

I'm coming up on year four of using a plain todo.txt file and a simple bash script to manage my daily tasks in it, and I still love the CLI simplicity. But this year I'm juggling several different projects, and needed an easy way to see my todo list separated into sub-lists by project. Happily, the Todo.txt CLI is now extensible, which means several handy add-ons can make it do all sorts of things not included in the core script. One of my favorites is the projectview add-on.

Projectview lists your todo.txt by project (which you notate with the +ProjectName format in each task). Here's what a regular listing of some of my current todo's looks like, and then what projectview outputs.

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