I’ve used sleek as my primary todo.txt UI for a while now, and I’m really happy with it. If you are interested in a simple, but useful way to put together a todo list in plaintext, the todo.txt spec is a great way to handle it, and sleek is by far the nicest GUI I’ve found.
About a week ago, I ran into a minor annoyance with an edge use-case that I have, and I wrote about it in the sleek github discussion page. Within 4 days, the maintainer of the project had a new build ready that fixed my issue. Nobody else said they needed it, but they took the time to add the feature I requested and now my workflow is that much easier.
I know not every project is like this, or can be like this, but there’s no way that something like this would get added at anywhere near this pace in proprietary software. I, for one, am super grateful that software like this and the people that maintain it exist. Thank you.
Please check out sleek!
Sleek looks amazing
But is there a FOSS todo.txt client for mobile (Android)? Searching around I could only find the official Todo.txt for Android on GitHub which is unmaintained since 2018, and some Todo.txt for Android on the play store which is up to date but not sure if it’s affiliated or not , and no mention of being FOSS
Not any good standalone ones. What I use (and this was to do with my edge use-case, actually) is Obsidian with a todo.txt plugin. It’s not as nice as sleek, so I still use sleek on my desktop, but it’s more than good enough to use on my phone to glance at my todo.txt, check things off, make small edits, or add new items in a pinch. It’s also how I share my todo.txt with my partner.
The thing I needed fixed was that in Obsidian, the plugin requires files with the extension todotxt, for example
default.todotxt
, and sleek currently doesn’t allow for loading files with arbitrary extensions. The new build the maintainer put together allows that, and it will be in the new version that is currently being worked on.Cool, Obsidian didn’t even cross my mind, thanks for the suggestion.
For mobile, just reading and ticking of existing items covers the main use cases for me. And sometimes adding new items too. That’s soo cool that the Sleek Dev added support for arbitrary extensions. I love when FOSS Apps become interoperable on the same dataset like that. Yay for data portability :D
Time to try out Obsidian then
Which Obsidian plugin are you using?
Thanks. Did you end up saving your todo file with the .todotxt extension then for now? Does that work for Sleek on desktop?
For now, I use the 1.3.1 release of sleek because it has more features than the 2.0.0-dev8 pre-release build that solved my problem. As a temporary workaround, I create my todo.txt files as
filename.todotxt
in my obsidian vaults and manually hardlink those files tofilename.txt
in atodo_txt
directory somewhere else on each machine I use sleek on. It works totally fine, it’s just a bit janky. I’ll be happy when sleek 2.0 comes out and I can get rid of the hardlinks.Thanks, appreciate the help! I can live without tasks on phone for a little longer, so I guess I’ll wait out for the release and then set up the sync.
For android markor (https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.gsantner.markor/) is pretty great both at todo.txt and in general
Thanks for sharing, Markor looks promising
Markor also has support for Zim Wiki, so I tried it out with some files from my Zim Desktop Wiki notebook, and it sortof works! Markor renders correctly, though I had some problems getting embedded images to work, because Markor didn’t find the images using the same relative URLs as Zim Desktop Wiki uses.
Thanks for this post. It has taken me down the rabbit hole of new software.
I now have f-droid and simpletask on my phone, sleek on my computer, and syncthing on both.
I have needed a really simple to-do list synchronised between my phone and computer for years, and just didn’t know this was an option. I’m very happy now.