Task Paper Musings

I’ve been spending a lot of time with the automation apps (workflow, Drafts, Launch, etc. The screencastsonline episodes and the MacSparky Video Guide were particularly helpful
I have heard Task Paper mentioned several times and I can’t figure out why one would need it if one had Drafts and OmniFocus. What am I missing?

1 Like

You might find this thread to be of interest.

The point about Taskpaper is that, given it’s just text, you can create it any way you like. And consume it any way you like (including those ways you’ve mentioned.)

There’s the Taskpaper plain text file format and the Mac app. The Mac app is a tool that has many specialist features for dealing with the file format, but the file format is such that you need nothing but a text editor to use it. The app just gives you a deceptively simple tool that is actually quite sophisticated in terms of how it enables you to interact with the format.

Many apps have support for Taskpaper. Drafts 5, Taskmator, Editorial, Sublime Text, etc. has support for the format and Omnioutliner makes use of it for data interchange. This latter point is where many power users make use of it by creating templates, sometimes dynamically generated, that can save a lot of time.

I think Taskpaper in relation to drafts and omnifocus gives a very flexible text based format which OF can understand and process easily. Setting up workflow / Drafts to parse taskpaper into OF makes things quicker and simpler.

There are some good discussions (including mine :sunglasses:)in this thread:

I and others note there that it’s good for really big messy projects where it would be too laborious to get all the details into OmniFocus.

There’s some great info here. Thanks! Now. . How does Task Paper deliver from Ulyssess? Do you use both and how do you differentiate?

@dfay do you have a sec?
Interested in your thoughts.

sure - what are you thinking about in revising this thread?

Wondering about this, if you use Ulysses:

I use Ulysses, but sometimes for cross-platform outlining I’ll put Taskpaper files in Dropbox, which can then be accessed by TaskPaper on my Mac or by Taskmator on iOS. (On my Mac I usually use OmniOutliner Pro, but I haven’t ponied up the $25 to unlock the OO3 for iOS so I can editing outlines; they’re read-only on iOS until I do.)

I find it to be a relatively primitive outliner (but of course it can be more than that) but for some of the outlines I make it’s fine. I like the app well enough, but I could see moving away from it if I weren’t so stubborn about paying Omni that $25

1 Like