Sub-tasks -- community has waited 20 years for this critical feature

[pm64]

Please refer to Bugzilla issue #194863, opened 20 years ago, regarding "Subtask nesting and event triggers (hierarchical to-do)":

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=194863

The case for this feature was strong in 2003. Now, in 2022, issue #194863 represents a gap in functionality that is simply unacceptable. Sub-tasks are a standard feature of every modern task scheduling system, including Google Calendar, Todoist, and a plethora of others -- making Thunderbird's tasks interface (and by extension, Lightning as a whole) inadequate for many use cases.

I raise the issue here because there's obviously no plan to fill this gap in Thunderbird. Might Betterbird come to the rescue?

[Betterbird]

Thanks for pointing out this bug, yet another issue that has been lingering for years, like the multi-line view, complex search terms, filtering untagged messages, body-searching in encrypted messages, etc., all features we've added.

Sadly our team has very little expertise in the Calendar area. Apparently it's very slow, or maybe that has been addressed, see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1642292#c102 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1789999#c15.

All that said, we'd need to get a lot of motivation to tackle the subtasks issue.

[pm64]

Thank you @Betterbird for the response, and please also accept my gratitude for the work that has gone into this project to date. Maybe 20 years from now a wealthy email enthusiast will stumble upon this thread and decide to right this historical wrong :)

[risaer]

Since years I try tasks with Outlook and Thunderbird from time to time, everytime it was completely senseless in my eyes since you get lost every time in all these tasks.

For some time now I use Nextcloud Task as a Chromium "Web-App" in combination with the Android-App Tasks(.org) (with Davx5) on Android. This is the absolute killer combination. Combining both apps the posibilities are outstanding. I can even convert e.g. a mail in TB to a Task, add subtasks with due dates in the other apps and see the entries in my calendars, add notes, etc.

Combining the positive things of both apps and include it into Thunderbird would be awesome but probably also not easy to achieve. But if someone starts programming it, he/she might find some ideas there.

I would love having subtasks in Thunderbird but as long I do have Nexcloud I can easy live without Thunderbirds tasks and prefer focussion on improving other improvements and bugs. (A Nextcloud-Task-Browser-Tab would be great though.)

Just my opinion.

Perhaps the above combination helps others too.

[Betterbird]

So we've looked a little closer at this. As per this comment subtasks are done via an attribute RELATED-TO which TB already supports, see this bug. https://tasks.org/ claims compatibility with TB, so what does this mean? If I define subtasks via Tasks.org, does TB honour the information in the attribute? What is missing from TB? An UI to create subtasks? The ability to get subtasks via CalDAV and have them displayed in a hierarchical fashion?

Lastly, the people offered to drum up some funding: @c-holtermann, @jpodolski. Maybe they'd like to support this effort in Betterbird.

[HyperCriSiS]

No further news here :grinning:?

[Betterbird]

Sadly no. We're not calendar experts and this needs funding.

[fgn-itsupport]

Maybe you can contact Jonathan Camens he collected some money for a TB Addons Kickstarter funding. I've seen him offer support to the Sieve extension developer. Maybe your extension would be a worthy project for that too? Should I contact him about it?

[pm64]

@fgn-itsupport any effort to fill this gap would be most welcome. If contacting Mr. Camens could potentially move things forward, then by all means do it!

[zesty]

might as well mention the other things that have passed TB by: kanban boards / todoist sections -> basically named sublists in a project that can be displayed as a board

a killer feature, perhaps for nebula++, would be some flexible way of filtering and selecting tasks to some association with a time-block, e.g. I have two hours at the end of my day, let me queue up some priority 2 tasks that don't take longer than 20 minutes; the compelling feature would be that the filters are part of a Type of time-block, so that I can time block a day and the right tasks will just show up in that block

Edit: see, for example "Re-using timeblocks" at https://help.amazingmarvin.com/en/articles/1950240-time-blocking and the smart list filters to match https://help.amazingmarvin.com/en/articles/2070779-advanced-smart-list-filters