Leaving Google Tasks for Org Mode

[Frederic Gilbert]

Hi,

Google announced that they will restrict Tasks to 2 nested levels of tasks (main level and one sublevel).

I have a heavy and complex use of Google Tasks and I will not be able to live this way, so I decided to opt out, and I looked for an alternative.

I finally choosed... Emacs Org Mode, which requires some time to get into, but opens a whole new and powerful world. With Org Mode you can even download or sync your Google Calendar and Contacts, which makes you even more independent from Google and their easily changing level of service (for example in Calendar they recently disabled event flairs, so you cannot be sure that what they give today will still be available tomorrow).

To get my Google Tasks into Org Mode, of course it was easy to download the indented text version using Google-Tasks-Backup, and apply a few "sed" commands to convert tasks levels to outlines or checkboxes.

So I wanted to thank Julie Smith for her great work and for this great backup tool which helped me when I had this intensive use of Tasks, and I hope everybody here will be able to use all this a little bit more.

Cheers.

[jacqui...@gmail.com]

Hello Frederic,

I also am moving to org-mode but have not been able to find any information of how I might import my google tasks...are there some links you can refer me to?

Thank you,

Jacqueline

[Frederic Gilbert]

Hi Jacqueline,

Sorry, I see your question after some time.

There is no standard / official / documented method. What I did was saving the tasks to text format using GTB, and then applying a small shell+sed script. Nothing fancy but the result was good enough to be used as a base for the org files, and to do further manual editing under Emacs (some =C-c *= for exemple).

I attach the shell and sed scripts.

Good luck,

Frederic