Taskwarrior & Good Program Design



I was recommended taskwarrior by Lars, who advertised it as a very cool todo-list manager for the commandline. It's available under cygwin as well. I wanted to give it a try today, so installed it and checked out the taskwarrior homepage. The first thing it does, it leads you to the 30 second taskwarrior tutorial where they give you a very tiny set of commands you need to make a todo-list in the most literal sense: A list of things that you have to do. Of course, the program can do much more than that, and I am not even familliar with all of its features. However, at this point already, I want to comment positively on the unusually gentle learning curve it provides, compared to most other Linux tools. This is an aspect of program design often neglected: Do not overwhelm the user, in particular not with features that are optional. I think a great many deal of open source projects could benefit significantly from improvements in that area, because all elitism aside, a large and devoted userbase is the heart and soul of a vivid, open software project.

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