[Feature Request] Please add support for multi line tasks.

[VladimirMarkelov]

Could you elaborate the feature description? At this moment it can be understand in a few ways:

• Print subject in a few lines (it is already implemented: TTDL automatically if the command-line option --wrap is set)
• Support something like new line symbol inside a task subject, and print it correctly (the main question is "how to detect where to break lines?". In this case, do not forget that there is the command-line option --short that always print a task per line. I think, a multi-line task with option --short should print only its first line
• Support something like: a task occupies a few consecutive lines in the file todo.txt. This case seems incompatible with todo.txt format, so I doubt it would be implemented

[debajyoti1990]

I was talking about the 3rd one actually. Found 1 issue https://github.com/mpcjanssen/simpletask-android/issues/929 but looks like https://github.com/todotxt/todo.txt is unmaintained now. We can close this ticket may be now.

[VladimirMarkelov]

I see. Thank you for the links. todo.txt authors seem against it - the first line of description states that "one line = one task" always. As of "unmaintained", I think the format is stable and completed(from author's point of view), so the authors just do not do anything. It was published in 2017 and has not changed since that moment (two last of commits in 2021 were cosmetic changes).

To me, the feature, at least for a terminal todo application, is questionable as well. For GUI-based todo applications it makes more sense. The first CLI trouble: adding/editing such tasks. Editing multiline texts in bash/cmd.exe is not fun (from my experience), I always try to avoid doing it in any shell. The second CLI trouble: displaying the list of tasks. A few long tasks can fill the entire screen and a user has to scroll the terminal here and there because there is no folding in bash/cmd. The list can be hardly readable. If a terminal application shows only the first line for compactness, then how to see the entire content?

I have more cons in my mind but the rest are smaller ones, so I won't mention them.

A related trouble: hidden tags. Let's assume todo.txt has the following task:

---
(A) Buy a gift on Amazon
due:2022-12-15
Choose one from:
amazon.com/product/002
amazon.com/product/004
---

If we display Due column, we should hide the due date in the subject(extra question: can the other lines besides the first line contain tags etc?). Print empty line instead or add some smart algorithms to print in a nice way?

[debajyoti1990]

To be honest I had used taskwarrior in WSL for some time so I thought it would be a nice addition in ttdl also, taskwarrior supports this by the way. But taskwarrior is a very complicated project and one can actually edit all tasks in any command line editor(I was using nano but others should also be good). Agree that multi line task is against the 1st principle of todo.txt but nevertheless it would have been a good option to have if todo.txt maintainers had shown interest.

Ttdl does not have to become taskwarrior, it's excellent as it is now. Thanks for your hard work🙏

[VladimirMarkelov]

I close the issue for now. If we really need this feature, we will reopen it