A cli TagSpaces client, especially geared towards The Secret Weapon approach to Getting Things Done.

A few months into 2017 I read Joan Westenberg's post about how she uses Evernote to keep track of all the things that she needs to do. In the article she has some pretty golden advice:

Before I get into it though, I want to be clear. What I do might not work for you. There is no golden key to productivity, and this is pretty specifically designed to match my workflow and my personality.

Which is, of course, fantastic advice.

While I'm sure Evernote is a fantastic tool with all the bells and whistles that one could desire, it's not exactly my bells and whistles. I have a slightly different approach that I prefer. I'm much more into the command line, mainly because it's the easiest way to eliminate distractions. Yeah, you can turn off distractions in your browser and on your phone - but you actually have to turn on distractions on the command line. So I try to spend most of my time here.

About a year ago I also came across TagSpaces, which has a philosophy I love: just stick the information into the filename itself. Then it doesn't matter what system you're using, the information is going to travel with the file.

After I read Joan's article, I started trying to use the TagSpaces client. It worked well enough, though it wasn't quite as keyboard-centric as I wanted. Using Dropbox to sync my files worked great (though they still don't have a client for the Raspberry Pi, grumble grumble).

I toyed around with using the command line, ls *1-now* or find . -name *3-soon* worked pretty well, but it was still a bit clunky. Out of that need came Shibboleth

Shibboleth is pretty simple. At the moment it only supports Linux-y systems (there's some weirdness on Mac OSX, with readline), but I'm always open to pull requests!

All you have to do is install shibboleth:

python3 -m pip install shibboleth

Or even better, use pipx:

pipx install shibboleth

(Come join me in the glorious future that is Python3 .6! Or, if you think it's awesome and you live in some horrible reality that requires something ancient, did I mention that I'm totally accepting pull requests?)

Once it's installed, just start it up in whatever directory you want to stick your stuff. Maybe you do something like this:

$ mkdir secret-weapon
$ cd secret-weapon
$ mkdir completed
$ shibboleth
Welcome to Shibboleth, the tool designed to be *your* secret weapon.

Your editor is currently vim. If you don't like that, you
should change or set your EDITOR environment variable.

⇀shibboleth:/home/wayne/secret-weapon
>new
Title: Try out shibboleth

That will launch your editor - whatever your EDITOR environment variable is set to. Or vim, if nothing is set. :q is how you get out of Vim, if that's not your thing. I added the text

Trying out shibboleth, how does it work for me?

Save and quit and you should come back to shibboleth:

⇀shibboleth:/tmp/fnord/Try-out-shibboleth[20170406~011315 inbox].md
>show
********************************************************************************
Title: Try out shibboleth

Trying out shibboleth, how does it work for me?

********************************************************************************
⇀shibboleth:/tmp/fnord/Try-out-shibboleth[20170406~011315 inbox].md
>

It will automatically select the new file. You may notice that it changed the spaces for -. That's because readline is confusing and hard and doesn't like autocompleteing spaces. But if you can make it do the right thing, did I mention I'm accepting pull requests?

Recently (in January 2022) I was reminded of the "inbox" functionality, so I added that as the default "priority" that will show up in the report.

Of course, you can change the priority of your selected file/task with priority, or the shortcut p.

>p 6
⇀shibboleth:/tmp/fnord/Try-out-shibboleth[20170406~011315 6-waiting].md
>

You can deselect to drop that, or select a different file. Or create another new one:

>new something completely different
⇀shibboleth:/tmp/fnord/something-completely-different[20170406~013345 inbox].md
>show
********************************************************************************
A man with three legs!

> 'e ran off!

********************************************************************************
⇀shibboleth:/tmp/fnord/something-completely-different[20170406~013345 inbox].md
p 4
⇀shibboleth:/tmp/fnord/something-completely-different[20170406~013345 4-later].md
>

You can use ls to list all the files in the directory, cd to change directory. Or if you just want to see what you're supposed to be doing now:

>now
trying-out-shibboleth[20170406~013326 1-now].md
⇀shibboleth:/tmp/fnord/trying-out-shibboleth[20170406~013326 1-now].md
>later
something-completely-different[20170406~013345 4-later].md
⇀shibboleth:/tmp/fnord/trying-out-shibboleth[20170406~013326 1-now].md
>

Or if you want a high-level view, use report:

>report
inbox
1-now (1/2)
        Trying-out-shibboleth[20220102~210020 1-now].md
2-next (0/2)
3-soon (0/2)
4-later (1/2)
        something-completely-different[20220102~210043 4-later].md
5-someday (0/2)
6-waiting (0/2)
done (0/2)
None (0/2)

You can use the work command to process either a priority or any other label.

Once you're done with a thing, you can compelete it, or be done with it:

>done
⇀shibboleth:/tmp/fnord
>cd completed
⇀shibboleth:/tmp/fnord/completed
>ls
something-completely-different[20170406~013345 done].md

That's really about all there is to it. The way I use Shibboleth for my day-to-day:

• Start up shibboleth.
• select startup which contains a bunch of URLs that I need to open.
• launch to open up all my startup URLs.
• work 6 to work my waiting list, to see if there's anything I need to move out of waiting.
• Go through someday, later, soon, and next to see if anything needs to be bumped up.
• Decide which of now I need to work on the most, then s elect it. I may ed it to add some notes or just show to review what I'm supposed to be doing, and probably launch the relevant URLs. Then when I finish that I mark it done and move on to the next.

As new tasks come in via email, etc. I go ahead and add new ones. I've been using shibboleth as the interface for my tasks for a while now and it works great for shifting the priority, creating new tasks, and editing ones that I've got.

If you've got any suggestions about what would make shibboleth (more) awesome, I'm happy to work with you to get your pull request in. Or if I've got some time or I think it's a killer feature, I'm sure I'll add it to my own list. Using shibboleth, of course :)

I would prefer to keep this as 3rd-party-dependency-free as possible. I'm not opposed to adding some kind of plugin architecture, but (Plugins were added!) I really want shibboleth to stay one single file. That way you can just stick it in a directory and you're good to go.

I've added a plugin architecture! Currently it requires plugins to be found in ~/.shibboleth/plugins. Plugins will be attached to Shibboleth's main loop as if they were methods, using the filename as the name of the command. For instance, if you wanted to add a really bad pomodoro timer, you could do that by creating a pom.py in the plugin directory that contained the following:

import time


def handle(self, line):
    print('Pomodoro', line)
    time.sleep(60*20)  # sleep for 20 minutes
    print('Pomodoro done!')

If you wanted to make it drop straight into the editor you could add:

    self.edit('')

At the end of the function.

When commands finish, any untracked/committed changes will be automatically added and committed. This means that when doing did or done, or tagging files will automatically be tracked.

Currently git is the only VCS backend that's supported, but it should be pretty reasonable to extend the behavior to other backends, like mercurial or fossil.

• Add BSD license - Done 2018-10-01
• Add other tag support - Done 2018-10-01
• config. We want to be able to config shibboleth, right? Different colors and what-not.

• done and completed no longer move done tasks to a different dir.

• pls inbox now works.
• report <priority> now will only list the tasks for that priority.
• work no longer crashes when given a bad set of tags. Also more helpful output.

• Added launch and view/show functionality to review.
• Added tag autocomplete to tag/untag functions.

• If review changes a selected task, it'll be deselected.

• "inbox" as a priority.

• "inbox" as the default priority.

• Restored 1-now as the default work priority.

• Fixed bug when your shibboleth directory was a subfolder in a repo that had modified files in a different directory in the repo.

• Automatic git tracking.
• clear priority to... well, clear the priority!
• Title is now inserted automatically into the file.

• did now inserts timestamps with a header instead of relying on the blank-space-at-the-end-of-a-line for CommonMark rendering.
• work now supports arbitrary tag matching, with autocomplete. Allows for working priority labels or other labels.

• Mis-provided log command no longer crashes, improved logging.
• No longer pass vim flags to all editors.

• Unhandled exceptions are now caught and written to shibboleth.log instead of crashing.
• Added launch command, which will launch URLs found in headers in the task file.

• work subcommand, to allow you to quickly process a particular priority. By default, it will work 1-now, but work 2 will work the "next" tasks.
• version command, to display the current version of shibboleth.

• Updated how prompt is generated. Shouldn't cause an issue, but something to be aware of, especially in plugins.
• Default priority is now now - this helps with tasks falling through the cracks.

• cmdloop passes on *args and **kwargs - useful for running loops from plugins.

• Review command that lets you cycle through your tasks, updating priorities.

• Duplicate tags are no longer allowed, though if added outside Shibboleth they will not be interfered with.

• Plugin system. Add .py files to ~/.shibboleth/plugins to extend the functionality of Shibboleth.
• Keep a changelog functionality for the changelog.