Searching for Flexible Checkboxes for Task Management

#1

Hi @hoopyfrood.
Just the day before yesterday, I was looking for a way to work with task lists that fit my way of working. Coincidentally, after looking at a ton of plugins and pages on the subject, I came across your wiki and saw your solution.
I have two questions:

Would it be very complicated to make it work with unordered lists? I ask this because it could be a way to indicate subtasks, something I’m looking forward to.

And would it have more states besides [o] and [x]? I mean, for example, having [/] for tasks that are being done and [-] for tasks that are postponed.
Although I have little programming knowledge, by dint of looking at code from other applications, I’m able to get things to come up. But if these modifications require a lot of changes or a much deeper understanding of the code, I’ll give up.

Best regards

Direct markdown/wikitext checkboxes !?
#2

Hello everyone.

As I told hoopyfrood in the previous comment, on Friday and yesterday I started looking for all kinds of solutions to have to-do lists in tiddlers. I’ll tell you about my search.

I was looking for something simple, which is why I ruled out Projectify or Cardo.

I looked at Kara by Mohanmad, but the fact that you can only have one list per tiddler doesn’t seem right, since I’ll have several in some documents. The alternative would be to transclude that information from other tiddlers, but I prefer to have everything in one document.
With the help of AI, I was looking into ways to run Kara twice in the same document. I think it could be done by duplicating the macros and variables, but I haven’t been able to get it to work yet.
Tiddlywiki’s default method also doesn’t work for me, since it would involve creating a ton of to-do tiddlers.
What I did like was that tgrosinger works very well and allows you to have as many lists as you want in a tiddler. It saves everything in the document itself without having to use external tiddlers or fields. There’s an updated version of it by tw-FRed that’s also good. But it still doesn’t have subtasks or allow more status categories.

When I talk about subtasks, I’m referring to their graphical representation, not that they’re linked to the main task like in Projectify and others. Simply that clicking a button on a main task generates a new one right below it with a tab, nothing more.

I don’t know if any of you know a way to implement this.

Best regards.

#3

Finally, I want to comment on an idea I had yesterday, although I don’t know if it’s possible or easy to implement in practice.

It would be based on using a field to store tasks and their statuses, of which there could be several.
Let me explain: from the field, a procedure would read the task data and their associated status.
Example: {[[Tasks 1]], 2}{[[Task 2]],1}…
Where the tasks and their statuses are found in the {}. I understand that if the task name weren’t compound, we wouldn’t have to use [[]]. The number following the task name would be the status indicator, with 0 for pending tasks, 1 for running tasks, 2 for completed tasks, and 3 for postponed tasks. To give an example.
Every time the tiddler opens, the macro reads the data from the associated field, and if the state is changed from view mode (I understand this could be with a button that changes its value based on the number of times it’s pressed. I don’t know if this is too complicated or if there’s another way to do it), the macro changes the corresponding value in the field.

It’s just an idea; since I’m not familiar with programming, I’m not sure how complex this solution is. But maybe it might help someone develop a new method for what we’re looking for.

Best regards.

#4

Hello @JuanPalomo
I am not really sure what you are requesting and what scale or number of tasks and documents you will be using.
There are a number of ways you could approach this to provide a solution.
Download Pending-Running-Completed-Postponed Checklist 1.json (845 Bytes) and drag it onto this @fastfreddy wiki
The checklists can be configured to have checkboxes or not and can have different text colours etc.
Tasks can be dragged and dropped into each/any list.
Tasks are contained in fields, edit tiddler to see specific fields and content
If all your documents are similar you can make this a template and copy as required.
You can also have text in the tiddler containing the checklist
Let me know if this is of any help

Edited post to credit @fastfreddy

1 Like
#5

I can’t get credit for @fastfreddy 's work! :slightly_smiling_face:

Fred

#6

Hi Fred,
I’m sorry @tw-FRed I’ve been using @fastfreddy’s Field-Based Checklist and have also been looking at your post on a similar subject of checklists by @ hoopyfrood.
Multi-tasking is not my strong point.
My apologies @tw-FRed @fastfreddy

2 Likes
#7

Hi Sunny.

What I’m looking for is a macro for simple to-do lists, either by invoking the macro itself or by entering some text that executes the macro, as in the case of tw5-checklis → GitHub - tgrosinger/tw5-checklist: Simple checklist widget for TiddlyWiki5: o la modificación del mismo hecha por @tw-FRed.
Something like this:

Captura de pantalla 2025-08-31 202257
Captura de pantalla 2025-08-31 202257907×501 18.7 KB

What I’d also like tw5-checklist to have:

  1. That it could have subtasks. In the sense of generating a task below the main one using a task button, but with a tab.

Captura de pantalla 2025-08-31 204829

  1. That it could have multiple statuses, not just two. I think they should have: To Do, In Progress, Done, Postponed.
    Captura de pantalla 2025-08-31 205048

  2. If possible, fields shouldn’t have to be used to store statuses (as tw5-checklist and Kara do).

  3. That the task text should be editable in view mode.

    Captura de pantalla 2025-08-31 205423
    Captura de pantalla 2025-08-31 205423952×185 5.3 KB

I don’t need task classes, icons to highlight the importance of tasks, or anything more advanced.

From what I’ve seen, the plugin tw5-checklis is written in Java, and I don’t know a thing about Java. I understand some HTML and CSS, but not much else. :sweat_smile:
I discarded the AI ​​idea, but I did a couple of tests modifying Mohanmad’s Kara to allow for more than one list per tiddler, and it was a failure… :man_facepalming:

The development of hoopyfrood seems interesting to me, but I don’t know if it will be easy to adapt it to what I want and if I will be able to.

Best regards.

#8

In the third post, I’m simply sharing an idea I had yesterday to have lists in fields, but using only one field and containing multiple task statuses.
Although I don’t know the complexity of the idea, I don’t know if it’s even feasible given my lack of knowledge on the subject.

Regards.

#9

@Mohammad also has TodoList . You can have multiple lists in a single tiddler, and you can specify a priority (which could be used for some other flagging).

1 Like
#10

it is funny how many implementations of checklists there are in tiddlywiki and we seem not to have a few rise to the top as favorites :thinking:

  • I will put that on a list somewhere :joy:
#11

Hi Mark_S.

Yes, I’ve considered that too, but it has things I don’t need (categories, priority levels) and lacks subtasks. What I’m looking for is something simpler, like what I explained before, and for me, the most important thing would be the subtasks.
There is a way to achieve this, but it’s doing everything in edit mode. I suppose many of you have already seen this in previous threads. It’s based on using this CSS sheet:

li.done {
	list-style-type: "☒  ";
	text-decoration: line-through;
	text-decoration-color: #ff0000;
}
li.defer {
	list-style-type: "▨  ";
	color: #bbbbbb;
}
li.doing {
	list-style-type: "⧄  ";
}
li.doing::marker {
	font-size: 1.13em;
}
li.todo {
	list-style-type: "☐  ";
}
li.br {
	list-style-type: "";
}

And in another tiddler, we put the following:

*.done Pending task
*.todo Pending task
**.doing Doing subtask 1
**.done Done subtask 2
*.defer Task difered

And then we get this result:

Captura de pantalla 2025-09-01 072508

The downside is that they can’t be modified in view mode; everything has to be done in edit mode.
I think hoopyfrood’s method uses some of this, but in a more elaborate way.

One thing I’ve been thinking about is using buttons with multiple states, and depending on those states, their appearance could change using a style sheet similar to the one I posted above. With this, we could have subtasks with multiple states.
I know it can be done, and I’ll look into it to see if I can find something out there.

Best regards.

#12

Hi @JuanPalomo
just another couple of ideas that may be useful or not.

@TankinatorFR’s Editable Table allows inline editing with a toggle button “To View Mode” or “To Write Mode” and you could indent subtasks

and

@telumire’s Taskers allows subtasks

1 Like
#13

Hi Sunny.

The second option requires external tiddlers and doesn’t work for me, at least not for me. I wasn’t familiar with the first option, Editable Table. I could do something with it, but I don’t think it fits what I’m looking for, although I’ll have to look into it carefully.
I appreciate the links; there are actually many solutions out there, and it’s not always easy to find them.

Thank you very much.

#14

Kind of a shame. If there was one implementation that was broadly seen as great, I think there could be an argument that it be in core in some way?

Certainly I’ve been watching these discussions closely and adding to my existing notes, in my working out what I want in a checklist - both in the way it’s stored (inline human-readable wikitext, in fields, in a seperate json, etc), the way it’s interacted with (everything editable from view mode, or everything only editbale from edit mode, or somewhere in between), and other features (sub-lists? colours and icons? dates? etc).

There is a surprisingly lot to consider!

#15

Right.

That arises because “ToDo” & “Checklists” can mean several things to different people nowadays. In the past it was simpler.

FWIW, my guess is that, eventually, a modularized approach will win … maybe …

  • A simple “checklist” will be in-tiddler as simple Wiki-Text (like the Grossinger approach). The point here is that simple WikiText editing is directly intuitive in a way little else is;

  • Optional modules for Additional Field Stuffing of extra data and, why not, Alarms against procrastination. That kind of thing.

Just a comment, TT

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#16

I think that is all doable and I am also interested in a parser that could do all of these things and also drag-and-drop re-ordering, without fields and without invoking a macro.

I’ll probably chip away at it but at a relatively slow pace. The subtasks handling is to me the most challenging part - the hierarchy bit (@saqimtiaz has this part figured out in Streams, so probably also doable). Interestingly, some of the core bits of Streams have been pulled out in the Streams Outlier, but I don’t yet know how usable that is for this purpose)

#17

Hi fastfreddy.

Thanks for your kind words. Honestly, I don’t care whether you call a macro or simply mark a few characters in edit mode. I understand that depending on the method used, it can be more complicated to do, but I can only guess at that since I don’t have enough programming knowledge to fully understand how difficult it can be.

Best regards.

#18

Hello everyone.

By chance, while browsing pages, I found this one that has a functional task model using the edit mode, and then you can check or uncheck them visually from the view mode.

Although the page is in Spanish, I don’t think you’ll have any problems with the translator.
When importing the tiddlers, I couldn’t get it to work. I don’t know if it’s because it affects a system tiddler and something needs to be modified to resolve it. When I have a little time, I’ll take a closer look.

Maybe it’ll give some of you an idea or you can use it for something else.

Best regards.

#19

Some of the tiddlers are javascript modules, so you’ll have to save and reload your wiki for them to work.

Fred

#20

I posted this demo in the original thread this one was split off from but my latest iteration of VT-markup has the following features:

  • simple inline markup
  • drag and drop reordering
  • no need for external state/field
  • more than 2 states for checkbox (can add/remove/customize as needed)
  • indent for subtasks

https://hoopy-wiki.tiddlyhost.com/#ReadMe%3A%20VT-markup%20drag%26drop%20checklist%2Fcycles

1 Like