GTD bundle for Texmate

June 21, 2006

"Mike Mellor has been doing a lot of great work with the GTD bundle, which I must say I have not really followed, basically because I've had no time and my own ideas about how a GTD bundle should be. Here in fact is my take on it. It is kind of inspired by Kinkless I guess."

I have not liked the idea of using a full fledge program just to implement GTD. In fact, I have always preferred just to have some program where I can enter text and check things off as being done or not. Of course, in this case, Textmate and gVim are both viable options, with me slightly more in favor of Textmate since I can customize it more easily. I do not really need a special organizer like Outlook because if I really need a specific time when I have to do something, I make it a point to put it into iCal so that it gets synched with my iPod and cell phone. Once, I tried using Sticky Brain since it offered synching to iPod and Palm. However, I gave up on it because it was just so cumbersome to start it up. Also, Sticky Brain had a plethora of other annoyances.

Anyway, there is already GTD bundle included in the subversion repository for bundles. However, I am not too pleased with it. I realized that it is still in its infancy but to me, it looks nothing more than a souped-up version of the TODO list bundle. And the way that it expects you to enter your tasks without being able to group them into nice projects just does not fare well with me. I am sure someone will work out all the kinks in due time. Or maybe not since everyone is jumping on the band wagon with too much ideas. Personally, I prefer a fairly stable conceptual model of the software to be determined before releasing the idea to the public. More often that not, mixing too many ideas from different people turns the original idea into some unrecognizable hodgepodge.

Here enters Haris Skiadas's take on the GTD bundle, appropriately called GTDAlt. I assume the "alt" stands for "alternative". Anyway, Skiadas has done a fairly complete version of the GTD (presumably from scratch?) that implements plenty of features already. I really like the fact that you can nest projects inside one another and the summary page (or the actions for context page) will recognize the relevant project. I also like the fact that you can give is a more natural date scheme: 3 weeks, 1 month, etc. But more importantly, this bundle has syntax highlighting, albeit with some quirks as I type the characters. For me, this mock up bundle has better functionality than the one inside the repository. Nonetheless, this scheme of GTD might no fare well with the other people.

So, I just thought that this will be a good time to write up on this bundle since it is fairly interesting. I am not sure whether Skiadas will follow up on this bundle (he has other bundles to his name but they have not been updated), but I might be interested in being able to have the summary page automatically post events to iCal using AppleScript. At the moment, the granularity for event resolution is based on days and not hours, so this probably might not be plausible.

In case anyone is curious, this entry was also entered using Textmate's blogging bundle. It might just begin to supplant MarsEdit for my blogging needs. It's kind of annoying actually, since I just paid for MarsEdit a few months ago! I am in no way insulting MarsEdit. It's a fabulous piece of software. Just that this blogging bundle is almost as fabulous and free! If you do not count the price of Textmate that is.

This is slightly off topic but I am glad that Textmate's cool features are implemented via bundles and not built-in to the application itself. This certainly prevents software bloat like - dare I say it? - Emacs.

Update: Either I am using the bundle wrongly, or there is something inherently wrong with the regular expression that is being used for syntax highlighting. After typing a few @actions, Textmate suddenly consumes 90% of the CPU and just sits there. I have been trying to debug this. If I remove the scope for the @actions from the language definition then I can type fine. Once I restore the entire language definition, the intermittent CPU spike happens. This is really annoying since this is really a great bundle otherwise.

Update: I changed some of the language definition for the line that is supposed to contain 4 match items. So right now, there is only going to be 2 colors: first color for the @word and another color for the rest of the text. I am not that familiar with regular expression so this is the simplest setting that made it not spike up the CPU usage. Also, I did add a small change to the notes so that the number displays in one color and the actual note in another. Finally, I moved everything into ~/Library/Application Support/Textmate/Bundles instead of ~/Library/Application Support/Textmate/Pristine Copy/Bundles since the original bundle does not like the new location. I cross my fingers and hope that Skiadas will offer a better fix.

Update: And indeed he has. Read the latest details on his new bundle here.