Sift

Prioritize your tasks from Things.app, in the terminal.

How to use

1. Install with Homebrew: brew install mybuddymichael/tap/sift-things
2. Run the command: sift
3. Use the arrow keys to start prioritizing tasks.
4. Reset all priorities with ctrl+r.
5. Quit with ctrl+c.

Options

• --refresh-interval <seconds>: Set the refresh interval for getting updates from Things.app (default: 3 seconds)

How it works

• Sift requires Things.app to be installed and running on your Mac.
• It displays tasks in the Today list, and will poll Things for updates every 3 seconds by default (configurable with --refresh-interval).
• Sift does not write any data to Things. It only stores parent-child relationships between tasks.
• Priorities persist across Sift and Things restarts.

The sorting method

Note

This is an in-the-weeds description of the sorting method.

• When a task is chosen, the one not chosen is updated to note that its parent is the task that was chosen.
  • In this way, we create a tree of tasks, where each task tracks its parent.
• In order to pick the two tasks being compared, we gather all of the tasks and assign them levels.
  • Tasks with no parents are at the highest level, their children are at the next level, and so on.
  • We choose tasks to compare by finding the highest level with multiple tasks.
• If a level only has one task, and all its ancestors are the only tasks at each of their levels, then we know the task is fully prioritized.
• The technical term for this structure is a directed acyclic graph (DAG).
• There will never be any cycles in the DAG, which means that we assume that if task C is a child of task B, and task B is a child of task A, then task C must be lower in priority than task A.

Tech stack

• Go
• Bubbletea (TUI framework)

Prior art

• Todournament by Tom Lieber