Michel is a bridge between google tasks and plain text files.

Usage

Typical usage

First, we save our tasks in a file:

michel pull > ~/.TODO

The file ~/.TODO now contains our tasks, as a tab-indented list:

shopping
	milk
	cheese
	butter
work
	call Joe
	prepare presentation

We will then edit our tasks. Let's add "coffee" in the shopping list. The syntax is to use one line per item, and in order to make an item part of a sublist, one needs to put a tab caracter in front of it:

shopping
	coffee
	milk
	cheese
	butter
work
	call Joe
	prepare presentation

We can now upload our new task list to gtasks:

michel push ~/.TODO

Configuration

At the first run, you will be prompted an url. Click it, authorize michel. You're done! Michel will save the authorization token as $XDG_DATA_HOME/michel/oauth.dat. No other data about your account is stored, and this token is the only information michel needs to access your tasks.

Commands

Michel keeps it stupid simple. It only has the two previously mentionned commands:

michel pull

Print the default todo list on the standard output

michel push <TODO.txt>

Replace the default todo list with the content of TODO.txt

Usage suggestion

Here is how the author uses michel. A crontask pulls every 15 minutes the default TODO list, and another one displays a notification during 10 seconds every hour (requires notify-send).

*/15 * * * * michel pull > /tmp/TODO && mv /tmp/TODO ~/.TODO
0 * * * * DISPLAY=":0.0" notify-send -t 10000 TODO "$(cat ~/.TODO)"

After you modify your TODO list, don't forget to push it!

michel push .TODO

If this trick is not working, it is probably because the variable PATH does not contains /usr/local/bin in crontab. You might want to set it manually. See 'man 5 crontab'.

Non features

Michel aims at being simple: it does not handle due dates nor notes. Do NOT use michel on your tasks list if it contains such information: it will wipe it.

Installing

install python-xdg, then run

pip install michel

About

Author/License

• License: Public Domain
• Original author: Christophe-Marie Duquesne (blog post)

Contributing

Patches are welcome, as long as they keep the source simple and short.

Neat forks

• If you are an emacs orgmode user, you should have a look at michel-orgmode.
• There's also a fork of michel that supports due-dates