Ask HN: Your favorite to-do list or task manager?

* Text-based *

If this appeals to you, Taskpaper is a really good format with a lower barrier of entry than org-mode. There is a Taskpaper major mode for Emacs, a plugin for Vim, and even one for Sublime Text 2 (though the author didn't credit Taskpaper or Hog Bay except as "inspiration" at the bottom of the README): https://github.com/aziz/PlainTasks

* Simple but GUI *

Literally anything that allows you to create individual items, tag them (or add them to multiple named lists - same thing), and then filter by tag or list. Tags are all you need to implement anything from pure ad-hoc task management all the way up to strict GTD. Priorities are not essential and can actually get in the way; I've always found it much simpler and less of a mind burden to categorize tasks by project ("project" here meaning anything that takes more than one discrete task) and then simply tag the "Next Action" for any given project. You can then filter by "Next Action" and decide for yourself at any given moment what task will be best to do with the resources available to you (time, tools, location, energy).

Some examples of solutions that will do this:

- A directory of text files with #hashtags in their contents and grep

- Notational Velocity / Simplenote

- Any todo list app with real tags (not Wunderlist, for instance)

- Outlook

- Taskpaper or org-mode

I actually used Gmail for this for a while. I could expound on that if you're interested.

* The Full Monty *

OmniFocus, plus the book "Getting Things Done" by David Allen. It's cliche for a reason. It's not a silver bullet (obviously, I hope), but it is an effective system, it works for a lot of people, and you will probably get at least a few takeaways out of reading about it.

For coding I use comments and a git alias (git todo) that returns the comments.

    todo     = !git grep --color=always --no-index --exclude-standard --heading --break --ignore-case -e ' FIX: *' -e ' TODO: *' | sed -e 's/^[[:space:]]*//'

http://orgmode.org/

I will also add all the ones mentioned here. My personal favorite is https://starthq.com/apps/wunderlist.

I was using Things before, but the rip-off pricing and lack of web and non iOS clients made me switch.

I like Wunderlist for its simplicity and the "GTDishness".

Supports multiple projects (or lists), sub-tasks, reminders, repeated tasks.

No support for tags, and the recent Wunderlist2 release dropped support for the great "smart dates" functionality, which was an absolute killer feature on their old version.

http://culturedcode.com/things

http://culturedcode.com/things/mac/appstore ($49.99)

Edit to answer to ralfy's reply below:

I recommend it to Get Things Done [1], for its versatility (projects, scopes, labels, scheduling and repeated tasks), its excellent user interface and aesthetics, and the seamless synchronization across multiple devices (Mac, iPhone and iPad).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done

https://github.com/richo/groundstation

You should be able to get something working by installing the dependencies, pulling in some github issues with ./slurp_github and then running airshipd

EDIT: Which is the logical successor to https://github.com/richo/TODO

I've tried most of the other platforms and none really delivered for me. At the very least I could find my old TODO anywhere since it was all online.

I like it because it offers automatic synching over multiple devices as well as making it easy to separate out each of the projects I'm working on.

If you can pay $, Atlassian JIRA is the best for programming, you can schedule/plan tasks, get reminders, much better sorting of issues/categories, phases, have them automatically close with commits (JIRA is just like github only way more advanced in what you can do)

Now if you are doing an open source project for the community then hands down stay on github

We have a search function for keeping track of tasks, an activity feed showing tasks completed while we also track stats such as tasks shared, picked up and completed.

You can add a new group just for yourself or add some people to it, you do it by typing their email address to "add user" field. Of course that user has to be already registered in the app.

  Project:
  - task
  - task @done
    - sub task 
      Notes for this task.
    - sub task @due(2013-03-03)

* this is something I would like to achieve

              -this is a sub step on the way to achieving it

              -and another substep

http://asana.com

I try others apps, some one of the people suggest but for me are so simple or so complex. Ubikfocus it's a good mix between simplicity and powerful features

- For code, Github issues/pull requests

- For team tasks that need to be delegated, Teambox (http://teambox.com)

- For scheduled things, Google Calendar

For more professional use it also has time tracking, reports, email notifications, dropbox and google drive integration.

I don't like that I can't hide tasks until they're nearing their due date however.

Turns out it's pretty hard to beat pen and paper.

It has both a web interface, Android app and an API so it's fairly ubiquitous for me. I find it simple and efficient.

Disclosure - I am a developer at Schooltraq.

Trello for sales pipeline, general project planning and management tasks.

Remember the Milk for tasks with a specific due date and recurring tasks, though I'd like to use Trello for that in the long run, too.

Search, editing and subtasks-by-indentation are convenient enough, as my text editor anyway is my main work tool.