The Plain Text Project
Recently I decided that I was going to solve the problem of: I easily write inline TODO comments while I work on code, but then have difficulty keeping track of them and getting my head back into the state of things later. While there is IDE support for such things, it's usually not <i>exactly</i> the right interface I want.<p>So I made a tiny CLI app that scans the source for TODO and FIXME lines and presents a menu of files, containing the number of items to work on in each. Then I type in which file I want to work on and it instantly reports all relevant lines, plus successive comment lines. All I have to do is punch in the line number and start working.<p>I felt a kind of stress relief almost instantly after doing this. It's better than Trello for me.<p>If I need to add additional kinds of data sources, many syntaxes, etc. it might become a bit more complex, but still managable as long as there's an API to get some plaintext lines out. It's basically following up on the hypothesis of a lot of information tools today: it isn't the data generation that's the issue, but the filtering.