Suggestion: Add Copy As Comment Text Option

[Fitnerd]

Hi Dan!

It would be real nice if the entire body of the comments could be copied to clipboard for the selected task in a single click (without switching to Comments text box, selecting everything and copying).

So, the "Copy As" menu would have 2 additional options (with assignable keyboard shortcut keys): "Copy As Comments Text" and "Copy As Comments Html/Rtf".

Thank you.

[.dan.g.]

Unfortunately all the comments formats are plugins whose type is unknown to TDL.

But this sort of problem is easy to solve with a 3rd-party tool like AutoHotKey (see also these posts on this forum).

[Fitnerd]

I see. I did not know that. Two more things then:

1. Perhaps this comment plugin interface can be extended with "CopyToClipboard" method, or perhaps "GetStringContent", so that TDL can use data returned by those methods to actually copy to clipboard.

2. Is there information on how one can write his own plugin for comments? Does it mean that one can make an arbitrary user control in say .Net Framework and host it inside TDL as one of the comment formats?

Thank you.

[.dan.g.]

>> 1. Perhaps this comment plugin interface can be extended with "CopyToClipboard"

I'll give that some thought for 7.3.

>> 2. Is there information on how one can write his own plugin for comments?

Yes there is!

>> Does it mean that one can make an arbitrary user control in say .Net Framework and host it inside TDL as one of the comment formats?

Yes and yes. Here is an HTML comments control I have just started for 7.3.

[.dan.g.]

What is your use-case for this? ie. What do you want the content for? Where will you be pasting it?

On Wednesday, 16 January 2019 21:25:39 UTC+11, Fitnerd wrote:

[Fitnerd]

Thank you for the answers! Glad to know you are considering interface extension for 7.3.

My use case is for snippets. I realize, of course that TDL is a Task Management App first and foremost, however, I find its hierarchical structure, coupled with plenty of built-in and user-defined strongly typed fields and comments, to be extremely useful in storing and managing other kinds of data as well. So, I would basically have a catalog of primarily plain-text snippets, and the idea is that I would just need to Alt-Tab to TDL, select the "task" with keyboard, and apply the Copy Comments command to have the snippet content in the Clipboard. I know, of course, that there are dedicated apps for that, but they have their own issues. For one thing I need a definitive, easy to edit repo of all my snippets, and TDL offers best management capabilities in this regard.

One last quick question. I could not find information on the format of Rich Text Comments. In XML they look like base-64 encoded string, but what is the underlying format - Rtf? Ideally I would like to be able to access that from .Net.

Thank you.

[.dan.g.]

>> I could not find information on the format of Rich Text Comments

The format starts as Rtf, which is then compressed with zlib, and then base-64 encoded.

[TonyG]

@Fitnerd, I highly recommend looking at PhraseExpress. I've been using it for longer than I've been using ToDoList (many years). You can use it for free for non-commercial, personal use, and there is a nominal license for business use.

I use PEx with TDL all the time. It doesn't interfere. It's not buggy. It's got a LOT of features. Snippets (phrases) can be set to be used in specific programs, not others. So you can hotkey ctrl-Win+C in TDL to jump to the current comment and copy the text, but the same sequence can be used differently in a different program.

About the RTF/zip structure of the CUSTOMCOMMENTS, as noted in another thread here today, I'll publish C# code for that if you wish.

HTH

T

[Fitnerd]

@TonyG, Thank you for your suggestion! I will certainly give PhraseExpress a try. My only concern would be that they don;t use proprietary format to store snippets, so I will need to look into that.

Still, I think the extension of the API to get at the custom comments contents as a string may be a useful thing.

Sure, it would be real nice if you can post a C# snippet to get at the contents of comments from TDL!