User Guide

Ever wished for a tool that can manage all your daily activities in distinct categories, and suggest to you which one you want to complete first? Well, look no further as Uncle Jim's Discount To-do List is here to save your day.

Uncle Jim's Discount To-do List (Uncle Jim in short) is a revolutionary mouse-free personal task manager that helps you to keep track of your daily activities through the power of your keyboard. Gone are the days when you had to click through several pages of menus just to add a simple task to your schedule. Our command line interface is not only flexible but remarkably easy to use. Just type the command and hit enter!

Moreover, we know that you understand your activities better. So Uncle Jim allows you to create your very own categories to organise your activities. Uncle Jim is also capable of managing both tasks and events so you don't have to use two different applications to be productive. Our unique product will intelligently sieve out urgent deadlines and serve up reminders for you, so you will no longer overlook another significant activity.

Sounds exciting? Then let's get started!

• Formal dates

  Dates in a standard numerical form such as DDMMYYYY or DD/MM/YY.

  Example

  1978-01-28
  29/10/94

• Relaxed dates

It is not always necessary to write it in full formal date formats - Uncle Jim allows relaxed date formats as well. If you don't include the full date, we will use the current month or year

!!! example 
    Oct 12 9pm
    9 May

• Relative dates

  We also understand days of the week and even relative date and time.

  Example

  next Thursday
  tomorrow evening
  in two days

If no time is specified when entering a date, Uncle Jim will use the current time by default

Help allows you to have a quick reference of the commands in case you forgot the format to follow.

You can add new tasks or events to the To-do List using the add command.

Although the list of parameters above looks intimidating, all of them except the name of the task are optional. Tasks will be turned into events automatically if there are two dates specified under the /d flag.

Here are some common scenarios where you would use the various parameters:

This allows you to delete the task specified by the INDEX parameter. The index refers to the index number shown in the current view.

After finishing a task, you can mark it complete by specifying the index of the task you wish to mark complete in the INDEX parameter. Completed tasks have their title struckthrough.

If you wish to mark a batch of task in the current view as complete, you can use the /all flag to mark them all as complete.

Note that this is a toggle command, so if the specified task is already completed, running this will mark the task as incomplete again.

If you start to have a lot of completed tasks building up, you can clear the clutter by deleting all of them with clear. Note that this only clears completed tasks in the current view.

If a particular task or event is important, you can pin it to the top of every list the item appears in using this command. You can also use this command to unpin any pinned task.

You can edit tasks or events using the edit command. This command accepts the same parameters as the add command with the addition of INDEX, which specifies which task or event you want to edit.

Note that edits are automatically saved, and any errors can be undone using undo.

You can use tags to organize your tasks easily. Each task may have up to 5 tags. Tags are alpha-numeric and case-insensitive, and you can use hyphens "-" and underscores "_" in your tags too. You can use the tag command to add, edit or delete tags from one or all of the tasks. Here are some of the examples of what you can do with the tag command:

Descriptions of tasks and events are hidden by default. In order to display them, you can use this command to toggle between the expanded version of a task and its compact form, as shown below:

You can drill down into your To-do List and see specific tasks, such as your incomplete tasks or today's schedule, using the view command:

You can also use the underlined character in the view's name as the shortcut when switching views.

You can search for tasks using the find command. The search is case insensitive and the order of the keywords does not matter. Add the /t flag allows you to specifically search for those tags.

If you wish to exit the program, simply type exit.

If you make any mistake, simply typing undo to undo your last action.

Similar to the undo command, you can redo your most recent action that you revoked as well.

You can use load to load another .xml file into the application. This can be used to restore a backup or switch to different lists. You can also use this to manage different To-do lists, such as having one for home and another for work.

By default, to-do list data are saved in a file called discountTodo.xml in the data folder. You can change the save file by specifying the file path as the first argument when running the program, or by using the save command.

The save command will show you the location of the current save file if you use it without specifying a FILENAME.

Our user interface is very interactive and features a lot of visual feedback to the user. For example, for commands such as add, edit and show, you can see upon which task your action acts upon by viewing which task is highlighted.

Also, Uncle Jim distinguishes between tasks and events, not only by different tag colors but by also handling them differently. For example, if you have a task that is overdue, Uncle Jim will instantly highlight it red.

For events which are ongoing, they will be highlighted green.

For events which have passed, they will be faded, but we leave it to you to mark the events complete.

If the commands are ambiguous, our system will ask you for clarification of which command you wish to execute.

For example, typing just e could refer to edit or exit so a message as shown below will be displayed to you.

Q: How do I back up my data?
A: As your data is saved to the file that you specified, you can simply copy this file to a back up storage of your choice.

Q: How do I sync my data with multiple devices?
A: Simply load the file to a cloud sync service like Dropbox or Google Drive, and all updates will be reflected automatically to all devices using the file.

Q: How do I pay for this project?
A: Donations can be made via PayPal or Kashmi. Cash donations are fine too. Basically if you wish to donate we will find a way for us to receive your money.