Exporting Org Agenda -> todo.txt and todo.txt -> Org Files + Suggestion/Feature request.

Exporting Org Agenda -> todo.txt and todo.txt -> Org Files + Suggestion/Feature request.

[Tim O'Callaghan]

Hi

I have a request and a suggestion.

Request:
Does anyone else out there generate todo.txt files[1] from
org/org-agenda? If you do, how do you do it. Or if not, do you have a
good idea about how if it can be approximated in an agenda
configuration?

Suggestion/Feature request:
An org-import mode/file format. The use case is about changing heading
states, properties, contexts, contents in a corpus of org documents
like the corpus represented by org-agenda-files, by importing file(s)
external to the document corpus.

The basic idea is a well defined reverse of an export/agenda. At the
moment i know of no explicitly defined mechanism for org data importing,
making sync/round-tripping between other systems a tedious task. If
there was an 'official' mechanism for importing from an external
source, then people can focus on what to integrate with rather than
how to integrate.

The easiest way to think about this is a kind of patch file format
that uses headline instead of line numbers to anchor the changes. The
emacs workflow i
imagine, should be something like patch, with ediff for the broken
patches.

Rationale:
I've moved to a todotxt file a form of 'shared agenda' for myself and
others i work with. Rather than needing emacs and my org-file corpus
everywhere, I can sync and share a single todo.txt. The todo.txt
contains our next actions/todos, decoupling the requirement that
everyone else has to use emacs too. The  use their own system and we
maintain the the tasks together in the shared todotxt file. I also use
the original todo.txt bash script to give me an agenda in my shell,
and now it is also in my favourite pomodoro app clockwork tomato[2].

Tim.
[1] (http://todotxt.com)
[2] (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.phlam.android.clockworktomato&hl=en)

Re: Exporting Org Agenda -> todo.txt and todo.txt -> Org Files + Suggestion/Feature request.

[Jorge A. Alfaro-Murillo]

Tim O'Callaghan writes:

> Does anyone else out there generate todo.txt files[1] from 
> org/org-agenda? If you do, how do you do it. Or if not, do you 
> have a good idea about how if it can be approximated in an 
> agenda configuration?

You could write your own export back-end 
(http://orgmode.org/worg/dev/org-export-reference.html). 
Alternatively, you could modify org-agenda-custom-commands and use 
C-x C-w to save the agenda view to a file.

Best,
-- 
Jorge.

Re: Exporting Org Agenda -> todo.txt and todo.txt -> Org Files + Suggestion/Feature request.

[Tomasz bla Fortuna]

Jorge A. Alfaro-Murillo <jorge.alfaro-murillo <at> yale.edu> writes:

> 
> Tim O'Callaghan writes:
> 
> > Does anyone else out there generate todo.txt files[1] from 
> > org/org-agenda? If you do, how do you do it. Or if not, do you 
> > have a good idea about how if it can be approximated in an 
> > agenda configuration?
> 
> You could write your own export back-end 
> (http://orgmode.org/worg/dev/org-export-reference.html). 
> Alternatively, you could modify org-agenda-custom-commands and use 
> C-x C-w to save the agenda view to a file.
> 
> Best,


I did in Python here: https://github.com/blaa/org2todotxt
Would probably be easier within emacs but i simply can't do sensible
cron/inotify within emacs and prefer external scripts.