Tasks Overview

Tasks gives your workspace a place to plan work. You group tasks into projects, track their status and priority, break them into subtasks, and link them to the notes they came from. Tasks live in your workspace as plain files, so they sync and back up with your notes, and you can manage them from the command line or let Ask Octarine work with them.

Opening Tasks

• Click Tasks in the left sidebar. It opens a Tasks tab on the first active project's Issues tab.
• Press Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + T from anywhere to create a task.
• Open the Command Bar with Cmd/Ctrl + K, then use New Task, Open Task, or the Tasks tab to find a task by ID or title.

With no projects yet, the Tasks tab shows Create your first project. Click New project to begin. See Projects.

The Tasks button is on by default. To hide it, open Workspace actions → Customise sidebar. See Settings.

The Tasks Sidebar

While a Tasks tab is focused, the left sidebar shows the Tasks tree instead of your files:

• Cycles lists the active and upcoming cycles with their dates and open counts. It appears only when cycles are turned on.
• Projects lists every active project with its icon and open-task count. Click + to create a project. Click the filter button, or press /, to filter the list.
• No project opens the tasks that don't belong to a project. It appears only when such tasks exist.
• Archived opens archived projects. It appears only when there are some.

Right-click a project for Open in new tab, Edit project, Pin project, Mark project completed, and Archive project. Pinned projects also appear in the sidebar's Pinned section. Use the arrow keys, Home, and End to move through the tree.

What A Task Has

Field	Details
ID	A project key plus a number, such as WEB-24. See Task IDs.
Title and description	The description uses the full editor, including slash commands, [[wikilinks]], and #tags.
Status	Built-in statuses are Backlog, Todo, In progress, In review, Done, and Cancelled. You can add your own in task settings.
Priority	Urgent, High, Medium, Low, or No priority (the default).
Labels	Any number. New workspaces start with Bug, Feature, and Improvement.
Bucket	At most one bucket: a lane such as Now, Next, or Later.
Due date	Optional. Overdue tasks are marked Overdue.
Cycle	The cycle the task is planned in, when cycles are on.
Parent and subtasks	Subtasks go one level deep and always share their parent's project.
Resources	Notes, files, and links kept with the task. See Resources.
Activity	Comments and a history of changes.

A status's category decides whether its tasks count as open or closed. Done and other completed statuses, plus Cancelled, are closed. Octarine records when a task was completed or cancelled.

Task IDs

Each project numbers its tasks under its own key: WEB-1, WEB-2, and so on. Tasks without a project use the workspace key, TASK by default, which you can change in task settings.

When a task moves to another project, it takes the next number there, and its old ID keeps finding it. Search, the Command Bar, links, and the CLI all accept old IDs. IDs are otherwise stable, so they're safe to mention in notes, chats, and commit messages.

Creating Tasks

Press C in a task list, click New task in a project header, click + on a group or board column, or press Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + T from anywhere.

The new-task dialog has:

• A title field (What needs to be done?) and a description.
• Chips for status, Priority, Bucket, Labels, and Cycle, plus the project chip in the header.
• A Template picker. If the project has a default template, it is applied when the dialog opens.
• A Create more toggle that keeps the dialog open for the next task. Octarine remembers it.

Press Enter in the title or Cmd/Ctrl + Enter to create the task.

New tasks pick up context from where you create them. In a list grouped by status, a group's + creates a task with that status, and the same goes for board columns, cycles, and labels. Outside Tasks, the dialog starts in the last project you added a task to, and a Created WEB-12 toast offers Open.

From a note

Select text in a note and use the Tasks button in the bubble menu:

• Convert to Task appears when the cursor is in a checkbox. The checkbox text becomes the title, nested items become the description, and a checked box creates the task as Done.
• Create Task from Selection turns the selected text into the description of a new task.

Either way, the original text is replaced by a task link, so the note keeps pointing at the task.

Tasks And Checkboxes

Markdown checkboxes in notes (- [ ] Item) are still plain text in the note and work as before. Tasks are separate items with their own fields, history, and IDs. Use Convert to Task when a checkbox grows into real work.

Where Tasks Are Stored

Tasks live in your workspace under .octarine/tasks. Each task, project, cycle, status, label, bucket, template, and saved filter is a small Markdown file with YAML frontmatter, and a task's description is the file's body. Comments and history live in .octarine/tasks/activity. Archived items move into .archive folders.

Because they are plain files in the workspace, tasks are included when you sync or back up the workspace. Octarine watches the folder, so changes from the CLI, a sync service, or another device show up in an open window on their own.

If a task changes elsewhere while you're editing it, Octarine shows This task changed elsewhere. Your edits here aren't saved yet. Choose Keep mine to save your version, or Discard mine to take the other one.

Quick Answers