Tick: A Plain-Text Task DSL

I’ve been pretty bad at tracking tasks across work and personal stuff.

Work lives in Jira, but a lot still slips through - things like:

  • posting improvements on Slack for visibility
  • writing a blog about a package I built
  • random follow-ups that never make it into tickets

I don’t want all of this in Jira either since some of it is just personal or informal. Personal projects sit in Linear. Obsidian started as a scratchpad todo list, but it slowly turned into a huge markdown dump that’s hard to scan, hard to prioritize, and mentally noisy.

I tried the usual tools too - Google Tasks, Microsoft To Do, Todoist. They all work, but I kept coming back to the same idea: I just want something simpler and more under my control.

At some point I realized I don’t even want another “app”. I want a single text file that:

  • is easy to write into
  • is grep-friendly
  • stays human-readable first
  • doesn’t need UI overhead to be useful

So I ended up defining a tiny “tick file” format and a CLI around it.

Tick file idea

It’s line-based, similar to CSV/TSV, but optimized for tasks.

<status> [p1|p2|p3] [=<duration>] [+<project>] [#tags...] :: <title> [; <note>]

Each line starts with a status:

  • - todo
  • / active
  • x done
  • ~ blocked or dropped

Optional fields:

  • priority (p1, p2, p3)
  • duration (=2h, =1d, etc.)
  • project bucket (+groww, +blog)
  • tags (#backend, #infra, etc.)
  • title + optional note after ;

Comments use ; at line start.

Sample file

- p1 =2h +groww #backend :: Fix checkout race condition
/ p2 =45m +blog #writing :: Draft tick format post outline
- =30m +personal #admin :: Renew insurance policy
x =1h +groww #android :: Migrate logging to structured format
~ +sideproject #ideas :: Build AI task prioritizer ; dropped due to scope

CLI

There’s a small Go CLI to parse and render it:

go install github.com/iamsahebgiri/tick/cmd/tick@latest

But you don’t actually need it. Plain grep works fine.

Examples with grep

All todos:

grep "-" sample.tick

Filter by project:

grep "-" sample.tick | grep "+groww"

Or in one pass:

grep "^-.*+groww" sample.tick

With tags:

grep -P '^-.*(?=.*\+groww\b)(?=.*#android\b)' sample.tick

Why this works

The whole idea is:

  • keep tasks as text
  • avoid UI dependency
  • make filtering trivial with tools you already have
  • let structure emerge from a simple grammar instead of forcing a system

It’s basically a lightweight task DSL sitting on top of a plain file.

For anyone who wants to dive in or extend it:

tick - task format + CLI

That’s it.