Simple Monthly Todo List Using Vimwiki

Introduction

I use Loop Habit Tracker as a reminder for daily to do checklist.

I wanted to implement something similar for tracking monthly todo list. But I was too lazy to implement an android app or fork and modify Loop Habit Tracker.

And running a webserver on a Single Board Computer (Orange Pi 4B) seemed like a bad idea as it constantly hogs resources.

So I decided to write a simple bash script to create a monthly todo checklist.

Prerequisites

Install neovim, vimwiki plugin and fzf.

Implementation

1. Create a directory monthly_todo_list
2. Create a template list.md with the monthly to do list.

3. A simple create script to copy the template list.md to {current_year}/{current_month}/list.md. Do this only if the file doesn’t exist

d=`date +%Y/%m`
if [[ ! -f $todo_dir/$d/list.md ]]; then
  mkdir -p $d && cp list.md $d/list.md
fi

4. A simple edit script to edit the current month to do list. Since vimwiki is installed, you can use < C-Space > to toggle list item on/off.

nvim $todo_dir/`date +%Y/%m`/list.md

5. To edit previous month todo list

    find $todo_dir -maxdepth 2 -mindepth 2 -type d -not -path '*/\.git/*' | sed "s|$todo_dir\/||g" | fzf | xargs -I {} nvim $todo_dir/{}/list.md

Script

Combining this in a simple script

#!/bin/bash
# To get the todo files dir
todo_dir="${0%/*}"

c() {
  d=`date +%Y/%m`
  if [[ ! -f $d/list.md ]]; then
    cp $todo_dir/list.md $todo_dir/$d/list.md
  fi
}

e() {
  nvim $todo_dir/`date +%Y/%m`/list.md
}

f() {
  find $todo_dir -maxdepth 2 -mindepth 2 -type d -not -path '*/\.git/*' | sed "s|$todo_dir\/||g" | fzf | xargs -I {} nvim $todo_dir/{}/list.md
}

while getopts cef flag
do
  case "${flag}" in
    c) c;;
    e) e;;
    f) f;;
  esac
done

To edit current month todo list, just run

./todo -e

And can add aliases to create and edit monthly to do list

alias mte="{path_to_todo_dir}/todo -e"
alias mtc="{path_to_todo_dir}/todo -c"
alias mtf="{path_to_todo_dir}/todo -f"

You can add more options, say to sync the todo dir with rsync or to commit and push to a git repo. Or use this example repo to get started.