Brenda

Brenda is an application made to replace my_ usage of org-mode. In particular that is:

TODOs
Time tracking
Journalling

Why?

I love org-mode. I think it's a great way of tracking what you need done, how you are spending your time and your notes. It's also a pretty good markup language.

Unfortunately I do not love Emacs. I am not a fan of how "heavy" it feels and I generally prefer to spend time in the terminal where it is definitely not great. I have also converted over to kakoune which, although similar to vim/evil-mode, does not have key bindings in Emacs.

For that reason I decided to write my own program.

Design

The main interface is a terminal user interface which relies on hot keys and vim style navigation. For example, 'j' and 'k' go down/up the list of TODOs; 'r' moves the TODO into the IN_REVIEW state 'i' and 'o' clock in and and out respectively; and 'J' creates a journal entry not linked to any TODO.

Any text editing that is required is done in kak, although later brenda should respect the $EDITOR environment variable. Journal entries are in markdown.

There is also a command line interface defined to create and edit tasks.

The program is designed to only have one instance running at a time. It uses sqlite as the datastore. It is written in Zig (v0.10.0-dev.4197+9a2f17f9f) with the stage1 compiler (due to zig-sqlite requiring it).

Usage

Build instructions

To build:

$ zig build -fstage1

This will put an executable at ./zig-out/bin/brenda.

Creating and editing TODOs

$ brenda todo new "This is the todo title" tags:comma,separated,list state:in_progress priority:2
$ brenda todo # List all TODOs in a table
$ brenda todo edit <todo id> "title:Different title" priority:2 state:done
$ brenda report # Reports what todos/tags have been clocked this working week

TUI key bindings

General

q - quit,
k - .up,
j - down,

Status

r - in_review
p - in_progress
t - todo
b - blocked
d - done
c - cancelled

Clock

i - Clock in
o - Clock out

Priority

{ - Lower priority
} - Increase priority

Journalling

J - Create journal entry
ENTER - Create a journal entry linked to the current TODO
h - Show journal entries for current TODO

Features

Current

TODOs have states
Time tracking
Journalling both linked and not linked to a TODO
Seeing a TODO's journal history
CLI
TUI

Future

TODOs can have links
Meeting notes tracking
Searching of TODOs
Searching of journal entries
Searching of meeting notes
Support for different editors
Create/edit TODOs in the editor
Repeate TODOs
Allow TODOs to have a deadline
Exporting notes

Non-goals

Building an editor
Integrating into an editor
Habit tracking
GUI

mattyhall/brenda