Mimic "Task" app by implementing checkboxes in description

[Teetoow]

Hi,

For me, one of the great feature of the "Task" app is to support checkbox lists into the description of a task. Moreover once a box is checked the progress bar is adjusted in consequence. Thus you can easily create tasks, check items done and see the progression of the task.
Of course a workaround would be to create one subtask per item to do and use the checkbox which already exists... But it's really boring to create and I don't think it's the aim of a subtask.
I guess that it wouldn't take to much time to implement like "Task" app does: recognize "[ ]" and "[x]" inside the description of a task and replace it by a checkbox.

Whereas your app seems to be really great (the look & feel, the journal support etc.) but without this feature it's unusable for me :(
Thanks a lot in advance.

Cheers,
Teet'

[patrickunterwegs]

Hey @Teetoow !
Sorry for the late reply, I missed this entry!
I'm afraid your request does not really fit to jtx Board ;-) I understand your request in a way that you're thinking about something like using Markdown in the Description that could have an impact on the progress or status. This would be really messy in the current architecture as you would also have to deal with combinations (explicitly created subtasks and subtasks out of the text). So I'm really hesitating to do such a change. But maybe OpenTasks or Tasks.org come closer to what you expect (they are also compatible with DAVx5)?

[Teetoow]

Hey @patrickunterwegs
Yes you got the idea. The idea is to recognize "[ ]" and "[x]" at the begining of a line in the description as a list, replace the "[ ]" and "[x]" with checkboxes and readapt the description of the task depending on the state of the checkbox.
This is already done in Tasks.org anjd this is what I'm currently using since it is exactly what I want.
Unfortunately it doesn't deal with journal and notes... And I really would like to get journal and note working on my phone.

I'm not sure that it would be so hard to synchronize the progress bar with the state of each items in the list of the current task and the subtasks.. You just have to parse the description of task and its subtasks and compute the progress bar no?

[patrickunterwegs]

Hey, just to finish the conversation here (then we should really follow up on Gitlab):
As I said, this would mess with two completely different concepts. I don't think that it's a good idea to mix them - either Markdown should be used to track tasks or explicit task elements.
Sure there would be some way to link a text with the explicit task elements. But you have to think of all implications.
Would you show markdown tasks also in the explicit task list? Would you show them twice? How would you edit markdown elements if there are attachments or other attributes? And many more...
Additionally with explicit elements you have a better control over the UI. For example checkboxes should have a minimum size to be properly clickable. Using markdown on a phone comes with less control over checkboxes. They might scale and be hard to be clicked/checked...
Additionally there is no official Markdown support on Android, so you have to use other libraries. I am already using the Markwon library in jtx Board to allow some formatting, but even this caused troubles. In list view I had to disable Markwon as on the one hand it could break the layout, on the other hand it caused issues with clickable elements.

The problems in this idea are in many details. After all I don't want to go this way with jtx Board mixing those two concepts. 😉

[devvv4ever]

Hi teetoow, please create a ticket over at https://gitlab.com/techbeeat1/jtx/-/issues if you want to discuss this further. Patrick has his complete workflow and feature request management there and it is easier to maintain the project if he does not need to collect information on various places :) Thank you!