To-do pane

On this page

Press Alt+J for your task list, in a pane beside your work. It is a to-do app with one thing no to-do app has: the agents you launch write to the same list, and every row says which one touched it.

Alt+J opens a to-do pane in the current tab, or jumps to the one already open. It is a pane, not a pop-up panel — it stays put while you work in the panes beside it, and it never resizes your terminals.

It also lives in the side dock. Open the side dock and pick its To-Do tab: the same list, with the same switch and views, laid out for the dock’s narrower column. The dock’s to-do follows the pane you are working in, so its project list is always the active pane’s project. If you have typed something and not sent it, the tab stays on the list it was showing until you do, rather than throwing your text away.

Two lists: Global and this project

The switch in the header picks which list you are looking at, and which list a new task lands in.

  • ◐ Global — tasks that belong to you, not to a repository. It is there whatever the pane is pointed at.
  • ◆ <project> — the list for the project this pane sits in. The pane takes its project from the pane you pressed Alt+J from: the repository it is working in, or its folder. Click the ⋯ to see the full path, for when two checkouts share a folder name.

Press g to flip between them.

A pane with no folder — one you opened from a terminal sitting in your home directory — shows Global only, and says so. That is not a broken pane: the global list is the whole feature for anyone who does not want a per-project one.

Two spellings of the same project are the same list. orrerix resolves the path once, in one place, so a pane opened at C:\Projects\loomux and one opened at c:/projects/loomux/ do not quietly become two lists.

Quick-add: type it the way you would say it

The bar under the view strip is where tasks come from. Type a line and the parts orrerix understood light up as chips to the right, before you press Enter — so you can see it read fri 4pm as a date and not as part of your title.

ship release notes fri 4pm #release !!
you type it means
today, tomorrow, tonight a due date
mon … sun, friday the next one of those days
next week, next fri, this fri further out, or this week’s
in 3 days, in 2 weeks a distance
at 4pm, at 16:00, 4:30pm a time — otherwise a bare date means 09:00
#tag a tag
!, !!, !!! priority — Low, Medium, High (see Priority below)
* important (the star)
@myday put it in My Day

Two rules are worth knowing because they are what make the parse trustworthy:

  • Anything it does not understand stays in your title, whole. It never eats a word it could not read.
  • A line that starts with a weekday is a title. Friday retro notes keeps every word; call the vendor fri gets the date. A bare weekday is a date only when something comes before it — which is where a date actually turns up in a sentence someone types.

And a weekday means the next one: fri on a Friday is a week away. If you meant today you would have typed today, and a task that lands silently in the past hour is worse than one a week out.

The five views

The strip across the top, with the live count on each. Press 1–5.

view what is in it
My Day what you picked for today (t on a row, or @myday)
Planned everything with a due date, grouped Overdue · Today · Tomorrow · This week · Later
Important everything starred
All every open task
Completed finished, most recent first

The counts on the chips are the size of each view, not of what your search matched — they are there to tell you how much work exists, so they do not move as you type.

A due date is only coloured when it is genuinely late. Everything upcoming is plain: if every date on screen were amber, none of them would mean anything.

Rows, and opening one up

A row is a checkbox, the title, and one line of detail — the due date, 2/5 step progress, a sun for My Day, a note mark — and its tags, as coloured chips.

Click anywhere on a row to open it (or press e, or click the chevron). It opens in place: its steps, a field for the next one, its notes, its tags, its colour, and the My Day / Delete controls. Clicking a control on the row — the checkbox, a tag, the priority mark, the star — does that control’s job and does not open the row; clicking inside an open row does not close it. It opens inline rather than in a side panel on purpose — this pane can be a narrow grid cell, and a detail panel at that width is a pop-up with extra steps.

Notes, a new step and a new tag are saved by the Save button that appears once you have typed something, or by pressing Enter in the step, due or tag field. What you have typed and not saved is never lost to an agent writing to an unrelated row.

Colours

Give a task a colour from the eight swatches in its open row; it shows as a short coloured stripe down the row’s left edge. The colour is yours to mean whatever you like — a project, a person, “waiting on someone”. The first swatch takes the colour off. Agents leave it alone unless you ask them.

Priority

Every row has a priority mark to the right of the title: ! Low, !! Medium, !!! High. Click it to step up a level; from High it goes back to none. A row with no priority shows the mark only when you hover or select it. It is the same priority the quick-add’s !, !! and !!! set — there is only one.

The ↕ Manual / ↓ Priority button at the end of the view strip sorts the view by priority, highest first; tasks at the same level keep your own order. It is remembered per view, and turning it off puts your own order back exactly — sorting never changes the order you arranged. In Planned it sorts within each date group rather than mixing the days; Completed has no sort, since it is always newest-finished first.

Reordering

Drag a row to move it: press on it, move a few pixels, and a line shows where it will land. Esc while dragging cancels. Shift+↑/Shift+↓ moves the selected row one place. Because pressing and moving on a row now drags it, you cannot drag-select a task’s title text in the views you can reorder — open the row, or use Planned or Completed, to copy from it.

Reordering works in My Day, Important and All while the priority sort is off — the views where the order you see is your own order. Planned is ordered by due date and Completed by when things finished, so there is nothing to drag there; Shift+↑/↓ says so instead of silently doing nothing. However long you reorder for, a move always lands: when two tasks run out of room between them, the list is quietly re-spaced in the same step.

Who did what

A coloured dot before the title means an agent touched that row, in that agent’s role colour — the same colour that role has in the session list and the group roster. Hover it for the agent’s name; under the title, a faint worker-3 · 12m says who and how long ago.

A row with no dot is yours. Absence is the human: colouring the common case would make the marks mean “someone” instead of “which agent”.

The dot says who, never how it is going. It is not a status light.

Keyboard

The pane is drivable without the mouse. These fire when the list has focus — typing into the quick-add or a note swallows them, which is why n and / are the two ways in.

key what
n quick-add
/ search
j / k, ↓ / ↑ move the selection
space complete / restore
e open or close the row
i important
t My Day
Del delete
u undo the last change you made in this pane
g switch Global ⇄ project
1–5 the five views
Shift+↑ / Shift+↓ move the task up or down
Esc close the row, then clear the tag filter, then drop the selection

Shift+↑/↓ rather than Alt+↑/↓ because orrerix already uses Alt+arrows to move focus between panes.

Searching and tags

/ filters on whole words across titles, notes and tags — rel note matches a row containing both, and it is substring matching, not fuzzy: searching omai will not find domain. Click a #tag on a row, or one in the footer, to see only that tag; click it again, or press Esc, to clear it.

Each tag has its own colour, and keeps it — #release is the same colour in every list, on every machine, every time you open orrerix. The colours come from the app’s own palette, and never from the ones orrerix uses for “overdue”, “error” or “done”, so a tag can never be mistaken for a warning.

The tag rail in the footer shows the tags on your open tasks in this list, most used first, each with how many open tasks carry it — not just the ones you can currently see, so you can always use it to widen a filter.

To tag a task, type #tag in the quick-add, or open the row and type into its tag field (a leading # is optional). Remove one with the ✕ on its chip in the open row.

Long lists

The pane draws at most 200 rows at a time and tells you when there are more (52 more not shown — narrow with / or a #tag). The count chip in the header always carries the real total. A pane that quietly stopped at 200 would be lying about how much work there is.

What agents can do to your list

Agents you launch get seven tools — list, get, add, update, complete, delete and restore — and they reach the global list and their own project’s list, never another project’s. Restore is there so an agent can put back something it deleted by mistake; their instructions say that a row you deleted stays deleted unless you ask for it back. Every write shows up in your pane immediately, with the agent’s dot on it, and every one is in that group’s audit log.

The list lives outside any repository, so nothing here can end up in a commit.

Reminders

A task with a reminder time nudges you when it arrives, as a small toast with a Show button that takes you straight to the row. A task with only a due date nudges you when the date arrives. Set either from the quick-add (fri 4pm) or from the due field inside an open row.

Three things are worth knowing, because they are choices rather than gaps:

  • A task you have already ticked off never nudges you. If you finish something at 3pm its 4pm reminder does not arrive.
  • Reminders live in this window, not in your list. Nothing is written when one fires, so if you have orrerix open twice you will see it twice, and reloading starts the day’s reminders over. The upside is that nothing about reminders can change your list.
  • You will not get a wall of them. Anything more than four hours late is dropped rather than shown when you open the pane, and several tasks coming due at the same moment arrive as one notice naming the first two and counting the rest — Show first opens the soonest.
  • If the task is gone by the time you click Show, it says so. An agent can finish or archive something between the reminder and your click; you get a line telling you which, and where to find it, rather than a jump to nothing.

Undo

u undoes the last change you made in this pane — completing something, deleting it, starring it, moving it to My Day, archiving, editing a note.

Three of those also offer you a button: completing, deleting and archiving each show a toast with an Undo on it, because those are the three that make something disappear. The rest are still undoable with u; they just do not interrupt to say so, which is what keeps the toast worth reading when it does appear.

It remembers your last 50 changes, and only yours: changes an agent made are not on your undo stack, and switching between Global and your project starts a fresh one. If an undo cannot be done — you deleted something more than 30 days ago, or the list is full — it tells you why rather than quietly doing nothing.

Finishing with a list: archive

Open Completed and there is an Archive button with a count on it. It puts those finished tasks away: they leave every view, including Completed, and the list is yours again.

They are not deleted. Show archived beside the button brings them back on screen, and unarchiving one is an ordinary undo. Deleted tasks are the other thing — those become a 30-day tombstone and then really are gone.

My Day empties overnight

A task you put in My Day today leaves it at midnight, the way Microsoft To Do works. The task itself is untouched — it is still in All, still has its due date, still has everything you wrote on it — it has simply stopped being today’s. Press t to put it back.

Midnight means midnight where you are, on the day you are actually having: a 25-hour or 23-hour clock-change day still ends at its own midnight.

Not here yet

Being honest about the edges, since a button that silently does nothing is worse than no button:

  • Reminders are a toast in orrerix, not a desktop notification — if the window is not open you will not see one.
  • Redo is not there. Undo walks backwards only.

Orrerix is MIT-licensed. This site documents what ships on main; the source of truth is the code.

This site uses Just the Docs, a documentation theme for Jekyll.