Next Actions CLI updated, time to meet the parents

I just updated my trusty na¹ script a little bit. Nothing major: some more colorful output and graceful error handling and cache updating when folders it’s recorded go missing. In the process, though, I realized how much I’ve come to love this little guy.

I won’t rehash it too much, you can read more about what it does on the na GitHub Page. Given that it’s been a whole year, though, and we’re still dating seriously, I thought I’d reintroduce it.

In short, it lets me add one-off tasks to the inbox folder of a TaskPaper file in any project folder from the command line. It tags new tasks as @na until you review them, and if run without arguments it will show all the @na tasks in the folder. I don’t need TaskPaper to be open, I don’t have to hit any hotkeys, and I can just get a thought or bug issue off my mind without ever stopping typing.

It can search for your tasks recursively in the current folder, and it keeps track of what it finds. If I ever used it in ~/Dropbox/Code/marked, it will give me some semi-fuzzy matching from then on out. From anywhere on the system I can type na mark and it will show me the current next actions for that project.

My favorite part today, though, is that I can run it as an extension to my prompt command, meaning that every time I cd into a folder with a Taskpaper file in it, it will show me my tasks tagged @na right before my prompt. Just friendly reminders when I go back to a project after being elsewhere. Here’s what I get when switching my local nvALT repo:

I wrote this a long time ago, but it’s one of the few scripts that I still use daily after a year. If you work on the command line at all, you might be interested in checking it out.