Taskwarrior: [feature request] allow user to combine two or more tasks

[arooni]

To request a feature...

task combine 22 23 165
Would collapse descriptions/notes from tasks from the second argument on to the first task listed. Would be useful when I do a search across a few different tasks and realize they are really related to the first task.

[heiderich]

While I can partially understand this feature request, I do not see how it should be implemented in practice. While descriptions and annotations might simply be concatenated, it is not clear to me how to handle due and wait dates for instance.

[arooni]

over ride any conflicts with the first task's information.

[JavaZauber]

Personally I would also benefit from the ability of _splitting_ tasks. I often see that some sort of action on my to do list is a _multi-step project_. I then need to create more tasks out of this one task. Usually these resulting tasks have a lot in common (usually they share the same project tag, same deadline, same review date, sometimes the same annotations, ... etc)

Is there already an issue open on this?

[JavaZauber]

over ride any conflicts with the first task's information.

In what ways are your tasks combined? Do the tasks share the same project or have depend relationships?

[arooni]

I think there is benefit to both splitting and combining tasks.

What I find is I'll do a keyword search find a few tasks that really are the same task, and might have different notes/annotations per task which are really all the same task but instead of copying over the annotations and deleting the other tasks it would be nice to have a command that does it for me.

i think we could make this simpler if we just refuse to deal with any depends relationships in this command. And use the project of the first task and overwrite everything else.

Whether other people think this would be useful is a separate issue. I'm also pretty open to how this would be implemented especially since I wouldn't be writing the code myself. Beggars can't be choosers :)

[pbeckingham]

@JonasDralle there is a duplicate command which is equivalent to a split. Any further processing than duplication is difficult.

[pbeckingham]

@arooni the problems with joining tasks are:

• if I join three tasks, what does the description look like? Simple concatenation?
• project is a single attribute, so what are the rules for joining three tasks having two projects?
• If a UDA is an integer, what are the rules for joining?
• How are all the dates resolved? Note that dates have internal consistencies to maintain (i.e. entry is always <= end

There are more issues, but these highlight the difficulty in automating joins.

As a general rule, this kind of command requires no core changes, and can be implemented as an external script with no loss in capability. As such, it would be rejected for that reason alone.

[JavaZauber]

@JonasDralle there is a duplicate command which is equivalent to a split. Any further processing than duplication is difficult.

whoa, nice

As a general rule, this kind of command requires no core changes, and can be implemented as an external script with no loss in capability. As such, it would be rejected for that reason alone.

Yeah that's correct. Same would be true for any command tho

[JavaZauber]

@JonasDralle there is a duplicate command which is equivalent to a split. Any further processing than duplication is difficult.

whoa, nice