🔔 taskwarrior-reminders

Bi-directional replication of Taskwarrior tasks across iOS/macOS devices, by way of iCloud Reminders.

IMPORTANT - This is still experimental and buggy, please back up your data before playing around with it!

How it Works

A process runs in the background on your Mac and responds to changes made in Reminders or Taskwarrior. When a change is detected it is persisted back to the other system. If taskd is configured, tasks are automatically sync'd before and after any changes to Reminders are detected.

Below is a breakdown of how Taskwarrior concepts map to the Reminders data model, along with the current status of bi-directional replication support.

Taskwarrior	Reminders	Status
Description	Title	✅
Project	List	✅
Priority	Priority	✅
Status	Completed	✅
Due	Notification	✅
Annotations	Notes	✅
Deletion	Deletion	✅
Urgency	Sort Order	⚠️
+next	Flagged	⚠️
Dependencies	Subtasks	⚠️
Tags	???	❌
Wait	???	❌
Scheduled	???	❌
UDA	???	❌

Legend:

✅ Supported
⚠️ Unsupported (no public API from Apple yet)
❌ Not planned

Installation

You will need the latest XCode and Command Line Tools (for Xcode 11.3) from Apple in order to build and install.

Once you have those, run:

$ make install

If everything went well you should automatically be prompted for permission to access Reminders.

If you see an error like dyld: Library not loaded, go back and install the CLI tools.

NOTE - This won't automatically sync your whole Taskwarrior database to Reminders, only the new items you create after installing. If you're feeling adventurous, run task-reminders-sync --all once to mirror all your tasks and reminders across both systems.

`taskd` and Multiple Macs

You shouldn't install this on more than one Mac unless you have taskd configured – otherwise tasks will become duplicated.

To prevent task duplication, sync is automatically called when any changes to Reminders are detected. This means your local Taskwarrior snapshot should stay up to date with your other online Macs, and you can safely remove any cron jobs or hooks that previously called task sync for you.

Notes on Taskwarrior Hooks

The tool doesn't take an opinion on projects versus tags... but included is an optional hook I find very useful. For Reminders created in the "Life" list it will automatically add a +life tag; and for tasks created under the "life" context it will automatically add them to the "Life" list in reminders. Install with something like:

    ln -s $PWD/on-add.context ~/.task/hooks/on-add.context

(Let me know if you feel strongly the agent should handle this for you automatically.)

If you notice reminders are not propagating back to Taskwarrior, it may be because you have failing hooks. The agent doesn't run in your shell – so if a hook executes task instead of /usr/bin/local/task, this will fail when being run by the agent. Fix this by ensuring your hooks don't require user login.

TODO & Known Issues

[ ] Deleting a Reminder list with outstanding items in it will cause all of the items to be deleted (expected), but the list will be re-created empty. Simply delete it again to completely remove it. [ ] Apple's Reminders API is not efficient about querying recently modified reminders, so CPU usage will sometime spike.