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clach04 edited this page Jan 14, 2025 · 15 revisions

History of todo.txt

The todo.txt specification was first documented/published circa 2006 on lifehacker.com (note screenshots missing, use archive.org http://web.archive.org/web/20090124143441/http://lifehacker.com/software/top/geek-to-live--list-your-life-in-txt-166299.php) (later todotxt.com, also missing see http://web.archive.org/web/20090126130822/http://todotxt.com/) by Gina Trapani.

Discussion and refinement occurred in Yahoo Groups, but data is missing. archive.org have some meta data? https://todotxt.yahoogroups.narkive.com/ appears to have (some?) messages but not files. http://web.archive.org/web/20090115193247/http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/todotxt/messages

Some project work was performed in a Google Code project https://code.google.com/archive/p/todotxt/, no longer available. Archive.org snapshot:

Dec 2006 Google Code created http://web.archive.org/web/20090205193729/http://code.google.com/p/todotxt

Project owners:
  	grahamdaviez, ginatrapani
Project members:
	kaschut800, shane.koster, mstiber, david.kanter, dara.stuff, gravies, algrsw, webs.dev, schliden, seth.hein

todotxt.org came into being 2017 around the same time the GitHub organization was created. See https://todotxt.yahoogroups.narkive.com/WZgtlm26/community-and-the-future-of-todo-txt#post1 which was when the .com site started to redirect.

The todo.sh (bash?) shell script was eventually moved to GitHub, the original project https://github.com/ginatrapani/todo.txt-cli has been deleted and now auto redirects to https://github.com/todotxt/todo.txt-cli, the repo goes back as far as version 2.1 of the cli tool (https://github.com/todotxt/todo.txt-cli/issues/441).

todo.txt-cli contained a wiki, the oldest version of a formal specification I could find. This now lives in https://github.com/todotxt/todo.txt-cli/wiki - however, the history of the specification is not immediately visible due to deletions and editing. This information/history is missing from the repo https://github.com/todotxt/todo.txt which starts about 7 years after the wiki specification was published (and 11 years after the initial lifehacker.com and todotxt.com published documents/articles).

Also see Document/link to old articles/samples/demos.

Authors / Contributors

Original changes to https://github.com/ginatrapani/todo.txt-cli/wiki (The-Todo.txt-Format.textile/The-Todo.txt-Format.md)

Whilst there have been other changes, I believe those are all grammatical (or mistakes). If I missed anyone, please post a comment.

Changes to spec at https://github.com/todotxt/todo.txt

This Repo History

This project, https://github.com/too-much-todotxt/spec is an import of that history limited to the spec as well as importing in the diagram that was linked in the later versions of the spec from George Snyder's https://github.com/snydergd/snydergd.github.io repo.

It is similar to https://github.com/todotxt/todo.txt/, with the following differences:

How this repo was populated:

git checkout https://github.com/todotxt/todo.txt-cli.wiki.git
cd todo.txt-cli.wiki
git fast-export HEAD -- The-Todo.txt-Format* > ..\todo.txt-cli.wiki_spec.fast-export
cd ..

# copy todo.txt-cli.wiki_spec.fast-export todo.txt-cli.wiki_spec.fast-export_rename
# delete from line 3114 on wards, i.e. do not have new essetially empty  The-Todo.txt-Format.md  and  deleted ?The-Todo.txt-Format.textile
# them replace all references to ".textile" to ".md" so as to avoid need to rename file later

mkdir spec_md
cd spec_md
git init
git fast-import < ..\todo.txt-cli.wiki_spec.fast-export_rename
git checkout master
cd ..

git clone https://github.com/snydergd/snydergd.github.io.git
git fast-export HEAD -- todo.txt_summary* > ..\snydergd_todo.txt_summary_image.fast-export
cd ..

mkdir todo_images
cd todo_images
git init
git fast-import < ..\snydergd_todo.txt_summary_image.fast-export
git checkout master
cd ..

# import image into spec repo
cd spec_md
git pull --allow-unrelated-histories ..\todo_images

Then the textile file was automatically converted with Pandoc, and then some manual clean-up applied. See https://github.com/too-much-todotxt/spec/commit/40009aab22dc5c38f7cb4fe378110df2ac8d6c40

pandoc --from=textile --to=gfm The-Todo.txt-Format.textile -o The-Todo.txt-Format.md
Clone this wiki locally