Best To-Do List Software? 532
JojoLinkyBob writes "Greetings, Council of Slashdot. I am curious what everyone here recommends as their favorite organizational software. Specifically, I am trying to find a simple freeware/open-source todo list manager. In the past, I've dabbled with TreePad,
Shadow Plan, Mantis, and various virtual sticky- note apps ..all with mixed success. Currently, I'm back to my old-school ways of scribbling my todo's on the back of each Daily Dilbert Calendar page, which sadly means today is June 23 :)"
What's wrong with Old School? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's really not a technical problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
It really boils down to self-discipline, much more than some specific methodology. I'm a fan of Covey's methodologies, but unless you really, really, really commit to it (or some other one more to your liking), you're no better off with a slick app than you are with to-do lists on the back of a Dilbert calendar page.
Re:Palm Desktop worth a look (Score:2, Insightful)
free, creates cross-platform, bloat-free files, no bloat in the program itself.. why bother splashing out on some fancy-pants crap that youll find yourself not using within a week.
win+r, "notepad".. wow, that will take all of, what? 3 seconds, ctrl+s, plonk it on your desktop and your done.
and come to think of it, whats wrong with paper and pen too? dont worry about data-corruption, your comp crashing out on you or anything.. jesus.
yunno, sometimes things ARE faster and more efficient when you DONT use a computer.
"Come on, we need to go shopping before the shop closes!" - "Hold on, i need to boot up my computer, open my fancy $50 program and read my shopping list first"...
Wiki (Score:5, Insightful)
the cutting edge of TODO list technology (Score:5, Insightful)
My TODO list is ~/TODO. I edit it with vim. Sometimes I grep it. When I get things done I dd that line.
I can access it anywhere with ssh.
Re:What's wrong with Old School? (Score:3, Insightful)
the pencil and paper will not remind you when its time to be somewhere or do something. or tell you your busy when you try to set up another meeting.
What you are describing is a Planner or Calendar, not a to-do list. IMHO, a to-do list is simply a list of stuff that needs to get done without precise temporal constraints. If this guy really wants the features you list, then he didn't ask a very clear Ask Slashdot question. In any event, I think you'll have to agree with me that his question is pretty piss-poor because he gives NO explanation what features he needs. Maybe he doesn't need any of the features you just listed. We'll never know because he didn't bother to list his requirements.
Re:What's wrong with Old School? (Score:5, Insightful)
what's awful about notepad? (Score:4, Insightful)
I know notepad is very basic, but what's awful about it? I can say that's the one MS program I've used that has never crashed and I use it a lot.
JPilot (Score:3, Insightful)
If you just want a free-as-in-beer organizer, the Palm Desktop is free for personal use on Mac or Windows.
Re:What's wrong with Old School? (Score:4, Insightful)
unless you got some slav.. coworkers, fiancee or somebody to call and tell to RTFTDL.
Re:What's wrong with Old School? (Score:1, Insightful)
Pen and paper has been archivable, and back-searchable since pen and papyrus. Who modded *this* insightful?
Re:It's really not a technical problem. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What's wrong with Old School? (Score:5, Insightful)
With even a simple textfile solution, I can generate changelogs and (primitive) reports with a a single command.
Re:RequestTracker (Score:3, Insightful)
It is similar to Bugzilla, except it's not software bug oriented
We use bugzilla where I work as a kind of task tracker and don't find it at all "bug oriented". With a small amount of planning and the right configuration, Bugzilla works great as a general issue or task tracker. You could seriously do a global search on the source code and replace every instance of "bug" with "task", nobody would be the wiser. It was a little strange at first to be asked how you were doing on a particular "bug" when the "bug" was something like setting up a new wireless gateway.
Before I came onboard, they tried to use RequestTracker but found it unusable due to the high load it placed on the system when only a couple users were logged in. They said they didn't have the inclination to debug it, so they decided to try Bugzilla next and have been using it since. (Sometimes we use it to file actual software bugs too.
We also looked at Mantis, but were horrified at how limited it was. But a bug-tracking system like Bugzilla is almost certainly overkill for a one-man todo list, which is what the submitter sounded like he wanted. For this, I tend to throw all those little tasks into a text file and then paste them into my personal wiki at the end of the day, where they never get seen again. (This is what has allowed me to post to Slashdot so frequently.)
Re:the cutting edge of TODO list technology (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Post-it papers on my monitor! (Score:3, Insightful)
All that means is your dad cares more about the security of his house than his wifi network. I mean, if they can see the sticky they're either: A-a friend or family. or B-a burglar. If the former, he probably doesn't mind them using his cable modem. If the later, he won't have a computer soon.
Some people really need to put "computer security" into perspective.
Re:Post-it papers on my monitor! (Score:2, Insightful)
To me, having a key that can be guessed by a dictionary attack while stopping at a traffic light seems worse.
Good simple ones for PalmOS & Linux (Score:3, Insightful)
HandyShopper [freewarepalm.com] is another good one for tracking non-hierarchical things that have costs and quantities associated with them. It does nice things like let you tally up totals, as well as maybe schedule recurring need-to-do/buy items. It's bizarre that it doesn't really have a desktop equivalent yet :/
For the Linux desktop, you might want to take a look at MrProject [codefactory.se], a nice Project clone that's part of GnomeOffice. I've only played with it a little bit under Mandrake, but it looks fairly competent when you want to add hierarchical schedule and resource loading data to your task list. Sadly, there's little else that I've seen that comes anywhere close, and I've been searching for one fairly recently for a project management class I took last semester. Oddly enough, I don't even like MS Project for doing this kind of thing, it just doesn't give me enough flexibility in rearranging things, scheduling parallel activities, automatically sequencing constrained resources, etc.