Global Inbox with Shortcut

[finn-matti]

Virtually all task management solutions offer a global inbox that can be reached by pressing a shortcut. Items that are created in this way end up in a temporary holding area for further processing. Obsidian Tasks lacks this feature at the moment.

[therden]

Hello @finn-matti.

You can choose any note in you vault to serve as your global inbox/temporary storage area for new tasks.

Using Obsidian's Quick Switcher core plugin, you can press Ctrl-O and the first few characters of the filename and press Enter to open your 'global inbox'. (If you wish, you could name the file ;.md, and open it with four keys Ctrl-O, ; and Enter.)

If you want to use a longer filename and/or a shorter set of keystrokes, check out the Hotkeys for Specific Files plugin.

[therden]

In my opinion, one of the greatest strengths of the Tasks plugin is that one's ToDo items can be scattered in many different files and 'pulled together' via Tasks queries.

For your case, I recommend that you check out the Quick Add community plugin. It may take a bit of setting up, but I'm close to certain that you'll be able to achieve exactly the functionality that you're seeking.

[finn-matti]

In my opinion, one of the greatest strengths of the Tasks plugin is that one's ToDo items can be scattered in many different files and 'pulled together' via Tasks queries.

I like this a lot, too.

I'll check out your suggested workaround as well. However: Here as with my other suggestion about de-virtualizing the queries, I'd like a comment by a maintainer. Not because your input is not valuable, but because the intended goal of starting this thread was to get an answer from the maintainer.

[aubreyz]

Quick Add works just fine if that is what you want. There is no reason that every plugin has to do tasks already facilitated elsewhere.

[finn-matti]

There is no reason that every plugin has to do tasks already facilitated elsewhere.

There is also no reason to not consider it, just because it hs been done elsewhere. Functionality is duplicated all the time, all over the place. This argument is not good enough to dismiss a request like this without further consideration.

In this specific case Quick Add surely is a workaround, but it lacks features that exist in the create/edit modal and that would be nice to have, which is why I think this request has merit.

[aubreyz]

OK fair enough - it may be useful to give the modal the ability to add a task to the bottom of a pre-defined file. +1.
You could however (with literally 2 keystrokes) create the task locally and then move it to another file.

However bear in mind that the task plugin is not the thing that grants task behaviour - it is simply an attempt to make some things (selected by the author) easier (likewise dataview and other task plugins).

[schemar]

Please use the Quick Add plugin for this functionality. It will be part of Tasks' documentation with the next release. You can already see it here: https://github.com/schemar/obsidian-tasks/blob/main/docs/advanced/quickadd.md