Dear fellow GTG users,

this is a little collection of tips and tricks on how to use GTG in useful ways. Some are easy to set up, other require a level of nerd/geek capabilities of 42. As this software is continuously growing, most of these work only in the last developer versions of gtg. But fear not! Read the first tip.

Peek into the future

Want to be tracking closely GTG newest features? Add the daily-build PPA from here

Organize your tags

Starting from version 0.2, you can now make subtags! Just open the tags pane (press F9) and drag a tag over another.

Backup you tasks

Your task list is important, so you might be interested in making sure that it's not lost by mistake. To make a backup, execute

tar czf gtg_data.tgz .local/share/gtg

You can also "backup" your tasks in Remember The Milk or GNOME Evolution (using the respective plugins), but keep in mind that not all attributes of your tasks are currenlty synced

Mail yourself a task

GTG does not support this directly yet but, just for now, you can use the Remember The Milk plugin for that. Just email yourself a task following this guide

Synchronize your tasks via dropbox

Just make a soft link between your Dropbox directory and ~/.local/share/gtg

cd DropboxDir
ln -s ~/.local/share/gtg my_gtg_data

and Voilà! You can share your tasks between work and home! Please be aware that you should not keep two sessions of GTG open at the same time with the same data. But, don't despair! Soon GTG will be featuring Ubuntu-One couchdb support, thanks to Ryan Paul.

Portable gtg

Download the trunk code from our launchapad page, copy it in a usb key, and launch gtg with script in scripts/debug.sh. You'll be one of the very few with a portable GTD application in your pocket!

Subtask with multiple parents

Want to make a subtask be a child of many root tasks? Just copy and paste its link in the Task editor. You can do some awesome stuff like: -Drink coffee

- Brew coffee
-- Buy coffee beans
--- Go to store
-- Buy coffee filters
--- Go to store
- Add milk to coffee
-- Buy milk
--- Go to store

We're planning to add the ability to easily see a task parent. Therefore, when you'll click on "Go to store", you'll automatically get a list of the stuff you have to buy. Sleek, uh? You can also make a tag have multiple parents from the WorkView. Simply drag and drop the child task onto any tasks that depend on it. Those tasks will immediately be hidden from your work view, and will re-appear once the child task is done.

Priorities

Task priorities can be easily done in GTG exploiting child tags (tags with are dragged-n-dropped over other tags). Example: you can have priorities @1, @2, @3 from the most to the least critical. Nest the tags as follow:

-@3
  --@2
    ---@1

if you select @3, you'll see all the tasks regardless of their priority, while if you select @1, you'll see only the most critical.

Mutt Integration

If you're not already in awe, you can skip this entry. For those of you who suck less™, this is the blog you want to pay a visit to. The command is:

macro index t "<pipe-message>gtg_new_task --interactive Follow up:<enter> <save-message>+Todo<enter>"

If you see too many headers try

set pipe_decode=yes

Android sync

Have an android phone? Synchronize it with GTG! Follow this guide on Paulo Cabido's blog.

Test out and develop GTG

This is for developers. If you want to test a gtg branch without risking your precious GTG tasks, you can run:

 ./scripts/debug.sh -d

Which loads GTG with a different set of tasks, that can be safely tortured at will without affecting your normal GTG session. And, if you want to start hacking GTG quick and *easy* follow this guide

Keyboard Shortcuts

If you are a GTG heavy user, you'll probably want to edit task quickly. Here's a list of useful and easy to remember keyboard shortcuts:

  • Mark Task as Done: Ctrl+d
  • Edit Task: Ctrl+e
  • Dismiss Task: Ctrl+i
  • Place Focus on QuickAdd Field: Ctrl+l
  • New Task: Ctrl+n
  • New SubTask: Ctrl+Shift+n
  • Quit GTG: Ctrl+q
  • Add Tag: Ctrl+t
  • Redo: Ctrl+y
  • Undo: Ctrl+z
  • Toggle Sidebar: F9
  • Toggle Closed Tasks Pane: Ctrl+F9
  • Delete Task: DEL
  • Show Task Editor Window: ENTER
  • Hide Task Editor Window: ESC

Think that a nice tip is missing? Comment this post!