Task Management with kbsecret

Preword: I’ve decided to do semi-regular updates on my kbsecret work. They’ll be somewhat similar to the weekly updates I did on muzak development, but hopefully more focused on practical use cases and less on implementation details.

I added a todo record to kbsecret this week, bringing the number of (usable) record types up to five: environment, login, snippet, todo, and unstructured.

todo records are a bit unlike the others in that some of their fields are not populated during creation (i.e., during kbsecret new todo [...]). In particular, the start and stop fields are left unfilled until the status of the record is changed, either to started or to completed:

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$ kbsecret new todo task-1 'soak the chickpeas tonight'
$ kbsecret dump-fields task-1
task-1: soak the chickpeas tonight
status: suspended
start:
stop:

The new kbsecret todo command provides the basic interface for updating the status of a task:

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$ kbsecret todo start task-1
task-1: 'soak the chickpeas tonight' marked as started at 2017-04-16 23:33:50 -0400
$ kbsecret dump-fields task-1
task-1: soak the chickpeas tonight
status: started
start: 2017-04-16 23:33:50 -0400
stop:

Both kbsecret todo suspend and kbsecret todo complete update the stop field:

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$ kbsecret todo suspend task-1
task-1: 'soak the chickpeas tonight' marked as suspended at 2017-04-16 23:33:55 -0400
$ kbsecret dump-fields task-1
task-1: soak the chickpeas tonight
status: suspended
start: 2017-04-16 23:33:50 -0400
stop: 2017-04-16 23:33:55 -0400
$ kbsecret todo complete task-1
task-1: 'soak the chickpeas tonight' marked as completed at 2017-04-16 23:34:00 -0400
$ kbsecret dump-fields task-1
task-1: soak the chickpeas tonight
status: suspended
start: 2017-04-16 23:33:50 -0400
stop: 2017-04-16 23:34:00 -0400

Like with the other record types, the utilities included in kbsecret for task management are pretty minimalistic (read: nonfunctional). The biggest reason for this is laziness, but I also want to encourage people to make their own utilities using the primitives provided by kbsecret.

For example, I’ve written my own little script, todo, that wraps all of kbsecret todo (and then some) into a nicer user experience:

Next Week

Another common use case I have for a general record manager (which kbsecret is quickly becoming) is storing long lists of URLs and general notes. I could probably use the unstructured record type to whip up a utility that manages lists like that for me, although it may be nicer to have a dedicated notebook or similar type that provides timestamping/delineation of individual entries. We’ll see.

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Task Management with kbsecret

Apr 16, 2017 Tags: devblog, kbsecret, programming, ruby

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