Taskwarrior active task blocklet

This is the readme for taskw-i3blocks v0.3.1. This blocklet shows what task(s) you currently have active in TaskWarrior. The blocklet will display the description of one of the active tasks and an indication of how many other active tasks you have.

The script has been tested in python 3.6, 3.8 and 3.9 on ubuntu 20.10 with regolith, and has no dependencies apart from a standard python install and (obviously) at least one of taskwarrior and timewarrior.

A version of the script has been submitted to i3blocks-contrib but the most up to date version is available from this repo.

Config options

• TASKW_TF : whether to display information about tasks (from taskwarrior). By default it displays the description of (one of) the active task(s).
• TIMEW_TF : whether to display information about time durations (from timewarrior). Displays minutes and hours. We don't display seconds because the block only updates every 15 seconds, and we don't display longer stretches of time because if you spend more than 24 hours on a task, you aren't making your tasks small enough.
• TIMEW_DESC_OVERRIDE : whether to pull task description information from taskwarrior (false) or timewarrior (true). Will also set TIMEW_TF to true if true.
• TASKW_MAX_LENGTH : the number of characters to truncate long task descriptions at.
• TASKW_NOTASK_MSG : the text to display if there are no active tasks.
• TASKW_SORT_URGENCY : a boolean to determine whether to display the most urgent active task (or the default behaviour which is to display the task which has been active longest).
• TASKW_PENDING_TF : a boolean to determine whether to display the total number of pending tasks
• TASKW_MAIN_FILTER option allows you to select a filter to display. The default is +ACTIVE.

Timewarrior integration

Integration between taskwarrior and timewarrior is via a taskwarrior hook that starts/stops timewarrior when you start/stop a task in taskwarrior. What this means is that if you have multiple tasks ongoing, the current timew duration is for the most recently started task (and the time for the task started earlier will be stopped when a newer task is started). So having multiple ongoing tasks doesn't really play nice with timewarrior. To make sure the task description matches the task to which the timew duration refers, we could do one of two things: optionally sort tasks by most recent start time, or get the task description from timew directly. The former would require a lot messing about parsing times and dates, so we can explore the latter. Timewarrior tags don't have any sort of hierarchy, so there's no analogue of a task duration's "description" attribute in taskwarrior. The description is passed to timewarrior as the first tag by the on-modify hook, although this sometimes doesn't work as expected and the first tag is the project instead of tag description, and I don't understand why. So I don't recommend using this override.

All this is to explain why only the following modes of use are properly supported.

Single task taskw/timew integration

Set TASKW_TF true and TIMEW_TF true. Use the standard on-modify hook, only ever have one ongoing task. Description information is reliably drawn from taskwarrior.

Timew standalone usage

Set TASKW_TF false and TIMEW_TF true. When using timew, make sure that the first tag is the one you want to appear in the bar.