GTD

A couple of days ago, Slashdot posted a story asking about “(Useful) Stupid Unix Tricks?”:

So the other day I messaged another admin from the console using the regular old ‘write’ command (as I’ve been doing for over 10 years). To my surprise he didn’t know how to respond back to me (he had to call me on the phone) and had never even known you could do that. That got me thinking that there’s probably lots of things like that, and likely things I’ve never heard of. What sorts of things do you take for granted as a natural part of Unix that other people are surprised at?

It’s perhaps unsurprising that there have been over 2200 comments exploring the arcana of the Unix and Unixy command line. A lot of awesome lore to check out.

Yesterday came the next story, “(Useful) Stupid Vim Tricks?”:

I thoroughly enjoyed the recent post about Unix tricks, so I ask Slashdot vim users, what’s out there? :Sex, :b#, marks, ctags. Any tricks worth sharing?

570+ comments later, there’s a lot to check out there as well.

Today’s post was inevitable, “(Stupid) Useful Emacs Tricks?”:

Since the Vi version of this question was both interesting and popular, let’s hear from the other end of the spectrum. What are your favorite tricks, macros, extensions, and techniques for any of the various Emacs? Myself, I like ‘M-x dunnet’ ;-)

200 comments and counting.

One of the most enjoyable parts of the Vim story, apart from the various spiffy command tips and tricks, were links to other sites. Here are a couple, along with a few related others I’ve linked to before.

• Best Vim Tips (Wikia) (at the Vim Tips Wiki)
• Efficient Editing With vim
• GTD with Vim
• Vimperator - Firefox add-on that makes the browser look and feel like vim.
• Word War vi - “A retro styled side scrolling shoot’em up arcade game for linux. Your mission is to traverse core memory and rid the host of emacs.” (See my followup post “Compiling Word War vi on Mac OS X”.)
• 7 Habits For Effective Text Editing 2.0 - Bram Moolenaar on Google Video. (PDF of the presentation.)

• Voodoopad lines to iCal todos “…script to take line-items from VoodooPad pages and make them into Todo items in iCal…” (tags: applescript gtd howto ical mac osascript osx productivity program programming python script todo voodoopad )

• Terminal Productivity Tips “…the most useful hints for working on the command line in the context of OS X server. It’s probably aimed at people who work with Terminal every day…but have never had the time to look around for tips to boost their productivity.” (tags: bash linux mac screen shell terminal tips unix cli geek gtd script osx productivity scripting )

• Using Emacs org-mode for GTD A brief overview of org-mode Emacs and how it can be used to implement David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology.
• GTD with vim Using an outliner in VIM with dynamic todo lists

Just in case you’d like to play around with the to do creation itself, iCal has a few properties for the todo class that can be added in a similar fashion to what you see in the PARTB string from totodo.sh:

• completion date (date) : The todo completion date.
• due date (date) : The todo due date.
• priority (no priority/low priority/medium priority/high priority) : The todo priority.
• sequence (integer, r/o) : The todo version.
• stamp date (date, r/o) : The todo modification date.
• summary (Unicode text) : This is the todo summary.
• description (Unicode text) : The todo notes.
• uid (Unicode text, r/o) : A unique todo key.
• url (Unicode text) : The URL associated to the todo.