One Thing Well

A weblog about simple, useful software.

You can follow along on Twitter or via the feed. Don't hesitate to get in touch. Sponsor the site.

One Thing Todo

One Thing Todo is the simplest todo list ‘manager’ I could come up with:

t() {
    if [[ "$*" == "" ]] ; then
        cat ~/.t
    else
        echo "$*" > ~/.t
    fi
}

Pop the above in your .bashrc (or similar—it works fine with zsh and ksh).

To add an item:

t Post to the blog about OTT

To read it:

t

As you can see, when you add a new todo item it deletes the last one, so you only ever have… One Thing Todo.

Can a single item todo list be useful? Maybe. You can do a lot with a one line text file: tattoo it on your desktop with conky or GeekTool, schedule a script that mails it to you every morning, or one that tweets it so your friends can see what you’re working on.

Update: Slimmed the function down, thanks to Marco.

OTT was inspired by One Thing Today, as seen on Minimal Mac yesterday.