Task Coach Files

Faster

• Task statuses, reminders and the views follow the clock at almost no cost: an idle file of 2,000 tasks took a quarter of a second every second, and now one short pass a minute; while many statuses change, the window stays responsive.
• A large file opens about twice as fast with less memory; sorting a tree view of 2,000 tasks takes 0.6 s instead of 3.5 s, and a filter, search or tree/list switch is faster too; a file of 2,050 late tasks froze Task Coach for a minute when opened.
• Closed editors, Preferences and floating views no longer stay in memory.

Files, saving and undo

• A file another program changed is never replaced unasked: Task Coach checks the open file every 10 seconds on every system, network shares included, and asks whether to reload it or merge its changes. Preferences > Files no longer has "Use polling for file monitoring".
• File > Merge combines two files, keeping the newest copy of each item; nothing is merged automatically.
• Undo and redo restore exactly what each action changed, and undoing back to the saved state clears the unsaved mark. Changes Task Coach makes itself (a status changing with the time) no longer mark the file unsaved, and opening a task's editor no longer changes a file just saved.
• Files saved by this version open in the earlier 2.0.2 releases.
• Categories given in a task's editor with Check all and Uncheck all, and those of pasted notes and of attachments' notes, were lost on save; they are kept.
• Items with the same ID in a file are separated when it is read, with a message; cut and paste keeps an item's identity.
• New items' IDs no longer contain the computer's network address.
• Text holding characters a task file cannot store (control characters pasted from another program) no longer makes the file impossible to open, and Help > Anonymize writes a file Task Coach can open.
• Opening the editor of a task that has recurred no longer marks the file changed and resets the task's recurrence count; changing the recurrence keeps the count too, so "Stop after N recurrences" counts the recurrences already made.

Tasks, categories and efforts

• Sorting by the Status column sorts by status; it sorted by subject.
• A fee typed in the task list is stored as typed ("12.5" became 0.50); the Budget cell accepts typing; a % complete or priority typed in the list is kept when you click elsewhere.
• In the Adjust due date mode, a due date changed in the task list is kept when the start then changes in the editor.
• Pasting several notes in a task editor adds them all.
• A task with subtasks shows its status icon.
• The effort view's rows, period totals and Task and Categories columns follow changes at once; decimal time, the calendar's week start and its gradient apply at once.
• A calendar saved in month view no longer stops Task Coach from starting.
• A reminder window follows its reminder changed elsewhere and closes without snoozing when its task is deleted or completed.
• Undo after changing % complete of several tasks says what it undoes.
• On Linux, New effort in the tray menu opens the effort editor; it did nothing.

Lists, editors and keyboard

• Editing cells in place is off by default, after an upgrade too; Preferences > Features > Edit cells in place turns it on, and Edit in place with a slow double click opens a cell only on a slow double click.
• An in-place edit box closes and saves when another view becomes active; a right-click in it acts on the box, and the list takes keys again after Enter or Escape.
• The selection stays where it was after a sort, a filter, a search or a drag and drop; collapsing a parent of a selected task updates the status bar and buttons.
• Ctrl+PgDn and Ctrl+PgUp switch views wherever the focus is; View > Activate next and previous viewer work, and making another view active no longer freezes the window.
• Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y in the search box and in text fields undo the typing, not task changes; Enter in the search box no longer opens the selected task's editor; Ctrl+Enter in the task tree marks the task completed instead of opening it; Ctrl+Shift+A is Deselect All only.
• A shortcut works even if its menu last showed it disabled (Ctrl+S after the File menu was opened with nothing to save).
• A held key no longer opens a pile of editor windows.
• Showing or hiding a column keeps each row's icons in their columns, and a column of icons fills at once; "Hide this column" works wherever its menu item lies.
• Tooltips hide when an editor opens and after Expand all or Collapse all.

Import, export and mail

• Dropping an e-mail from Thunderbird, Evolution or Claws Mail, or a file from a file manager, attaches it again. Where no keychain can store the mail password, Task Coach asks for it once until it quits, without an error message asking for a bug report; a mail server offering NTLM no longer gives an error.
• File > Import > CSV works again. It has an Encoding choice, set to the guessed encoding: a file that shows garbled in the preview (Central European and Turkish files on most systems) imports right once its encoding is chosen. It reads month names and AM/PM in the system's language as well as English; a date without its day or month imports empty instead of taking today's (a missing year is still this year); "Due: 2026-10-05" is year-month-day with day first chosen; a number too long to be a date no longer stops the import.
• Template dates such as "2 days before sunday" or "2 days after last sunday" give the right day; they went the wrong way. Weekday names are English on every system, as the Help says: on other systems "next saturday" was refused and templates using weekday names were missing from New task from template.
• On Linux and macOS, starting Task Coach with --ini no longer moves your templates to a templates-old folder, out of New task from template. Templates already moved can be brought back with File > Import template.

Languages

• French, Spanish and Portuguese (Portugal and Brazil): the task, category and effort views, editors, menus and file messages no longer show texts in English.
• The language from the environment follows the usual order: LC_ALL, then LC_MESSAGES, then LANG.
• With a settings file given with --ini, dates, times and amounts follow its formats.

Removed

• The Dependency Graph view: no install provided the library it needed.
• The window options "Start with the main window iconized", "Hide main window when iconized" and "Minimize main window when closed".

Packages

• The Ubuntu 22.04 package installs: Task Coach no longer needs pyparsing 3.
• The Debian, Arch and Fedora packages install PyGObject, which the tray icon needs on desktops using AppIndicator.
• Task Coach no longer needs pypubsub, lxml, watchdog, pyxdg, distro, numpy, WMI, pyparsing or six; the Windows installer is 16 MB smaller.
• The setup scripts for running from source finish, and install spell checking.