Frequently Asked Questions

(Actually, that's a misnomer. These are really Repeatedly Asked Questions.)

Q: When I redirect the output of task to a file, I lose all the colors. How do I fix this?
A: Task knows when the output is not going directly to a terminal, and strips out all the color control characters. Prevent this with the following entry in your .taskrc file:

_forcecolor=on

Q: How do I backup my task data files? Where are they?
A: Task writes all pending tasks to the file ~/.task/pending.data and all completed and deleted tasks to ~/.task/completed.data. They are text files, so they can just be copied to another location for safekeeping. Don't forget there is also the ~/.taskrc file that contains your task configuration data.

Q: How can I separate my work tasks from my home tasks? Specifically, can I keep them completely separate?
A: You can do this by creating an alternate .taskrc file, then using shell aliases. Here is are example Bash commands to achieve this:

% cp ~/.taskrc ~/.taskrc_home
% (now edit .taskrc_home to change the value of data.location)
% alias wtask="task"
% alias htask="task rc:~/.taskrc_home"

This gives you two commands, 'wtask' and 'htask' that operate using two different sets of task data files.