GitToDo Install Guide #1: the command line utilities

Some years ago I was in need of a todo list tool. Of course, the requirements were simple: distributed, version controlled, command line support (I must be able to access it with minimal requirements). I also hooked it up with the Freemind mindmapping tool. I am in the process of installing it on my new laptop, so thought a walk-through might be useful.

First thing to do is to get a copy of the source code (sorry, no binaries yet).Because we are compiling from source we have to install some utilities (using Debian/Ubuntu formalism; tune to your platform):

$ sudo aptitude install openjdk-6-jdk git ant

We also need to install Java libraries used by GitToDo:

$ sudo aptitude install libcommons-cli-java

Then, we are ready to download the source:

$ git clone git://github.com/egonw/gtd.git

The source for the command line utilities is found in the com.github.gittodo, which is in fact an Eclipse project too:

$ cd gtd
$ cd com.github.gittodo

The README file in this folder explains how to continue, which is first to compile the code with Ant. We first need to tell Ant where the dependencies are found, for which we use a .properties file:

$ cp ant.properties.template ant.properties
$ nano ant.properties

The template properties are written for Debian/Ubuntu systems, but you can tune it to your likes.

The compiling itself is then as simple as any project using Ant:

$ ant clean make
$ sudo ant install

We now have our command line utilities installed. However, there is one last step left, or otherwise you get an error message like this:

$ gtd-list-items
java.io.FileNotFoundException: /home/egonw/.gtdrc (No such file or directory)

We now need to set up a git repository at a convenient place and let GitToDo know about it. We create the git repository with (I have it in $HOME/var/Projects/hg):

$ cd $HOME/var/Projects/hg
$ mkdir gtdrepos
$ cd gtdrepos
$ git init
$ git add .

And we edit the $HOME/.gtdrc file to point it to this new repository, so that:

$ cat ~/.gtdrc
Repository=/home/egonw/var/gtdrepos

Now we are ready to add a first todo item:

$ gtd-create-item Install GitTodo-Freemind and the GitToDo GUI.
gtd-list-items