Hi Alexander,
thanks for your great work, exactly what I'm looking for in order to create a statistic for my GTD behavior. But how do you produce that example chart with the title "Things 3 Tasks (14 days)", the file in img/example3.jpg ? With things.sh csh I produce the csv file, import it into excel and create a pivot table from the column creation date but the result is different :-(
Can you please explain your steps in Excel (or Numbers).

Thanks in advance
Dominik

As requested via slack

Looks like there's an extra - in the filename, causing 3.0 to fail when running brew update https://github.com/AlexanderWillner/things.sh/releases/download/3.0/things.sh--3.0.arm64_ventura.bottle.tar.gz

vs

https://github.com/AlexanderWillner/things.sh/releases/download/3.0/things.sh-3.0.arm64_ventura.bottle.tar.gz

The CSV export concatenates multi-line notes fields into one line by replacing CR (13) and LF (10) characters with a comma. This makes the notes fields unreadable in the CSV export.

Furthermore, you cannot undo the damage using search and replace, because commas appear frequently in normal text.

The CSV format is capable of handling multi-line values. They just need to be enclosed in double quotes as I understand. Furthermore, Excel will import them successfully, and display them as a multi-line cell. This is the desired behaviour, in my view.

Years ago, there was a Things 2 export AppleScript floating around, which isn't really usable now for several reasons - but one thing it did get right is that it preserved multi-line notes in CSV correctly. And these were handled by Excel without issue - each multi-line notes field appeared in a single cell in Excel containing the notes text with line breaks.

In my opinion, the CSV export should follow the principle of least surprise. It should preserve users' data wherever possible, without mangling or corrupting it. That includes preserving line breaks in the notes fields.

Great project btw, however, I have an issue with tasks in headings.

I have tasks that are in an area, in a project, and in a heading.

Example from interface:

When exporting to csv, these tasks have no useful properties that allow them to be placed in the structure. The task in the csv is of type 0. The, area, project, and subtask, are all blank. This makes it indistinguishable from a task in the inbox.

This is an excellent piece of software, thank you so much for your work on it.

A small issue. Tasks with a semicolon, which is used in some URLs, break the CSV formatting. Might be fixable by replacing all existing semi colons before the csv conversion with \;

Hello -

Have you thought about outputing an ical file so it can be subscribed to? This would be useful for showing (and linking to) deadlines and schedules.

Happy to help with this - would be good if there was a way to output by 'area'.

Could be something like this:

things.sh ical --area "Work" > work.ical

If you run this as a cron job and output to a dropbox location, you can subscribe to the ical.

Hi,
I try to create a query (for the very beginning with my DB tool DBVisualizer) in order to count the tasks created today.
Something like
select * from TMTask where creationDate == date('now');
As I saw, column TMTask.creationDate is of type REAL and sqlite function date(...) can convert dates, but how I can combine both in order to archive my goal ?

After I got the query working, I hopefully can setup a plugin for using it together with the things.sh....

Kind regards
Dominik

When exporting to csv,

things.sh csv > Things3Export.csv && open Things3Export.csv

the file is successfully exported, but all Cyrillic characters disappear.

Is it possible to tell things.sh where the Things database is? I'm using Things 3 beta so the location of the database differs slightly from the standard installation.

Hi,
the new release of Things breaks the script in 2 ways:

1 DB location changed

Old: "/Library/Group Containers/JLMPQHK86H.com.culturedcode.ThingsMac/Things Database.thingsdatabase/main.sqli"

New: "/Library/Group Containers/JLMPQHK86H.com.culturedcode.ThingsMac/**ThingsData-XXXXX**/Things Database.thingsdatabase/main.sqli"

2 DB structure seemingly changed, i get the following error:

Error: in prepare, no such column:
TASK.dueDate
SELECT date(TASK.dueDate,"unixepoc..

Would it be possible to have a task's notes exported into a column in a CSV export?

Hi there,

CSVs generated appear to give incorrect URIs in the case of subtasks – these begin thingstodo:// rather than things:/// and do not succeed in linking to the task in question.

Am I doing something wrong, or is this an issue?

Thanks in advance, and very grateful for this utility!

I've moved my things to a different computer and want to delete this from my old computer. Could you help me with the uninstallation?

I am using this script to log my list of completed tasks every day - I made a "logbook" plugin to pull up tasks whose stop date is today, by modifying the inbox plugin.

I'd love for this to also show me the tags of the tasks - I poked into the database and it looks like I'll have to pull this up by passing the task id into the tags table - unfortunately, I don't know how to do that. I went through tags.sh but I am still unsure.

If it is something relatively straightforward, could you please point me in the right direction?

I'm barely literate with bash and SQL - sorry for the trouble and thanks for taking a look!

Hi,

I haven't been here in a while, but I have to say the iCal feed is wonderful! 🎉

I've done a quick hack to use Start Dates instead of Due Dates for my Calendar feed. This way I can see all my tasks for each day coming up. I also added some data to the feed to include the Project or Area next to the task name for reference.

I'd love to contribute and create options for this in the repo, but not sure how exactly to do that yet within the project structure you currently have.

Thanks!

The documentation says that by default, CSV export generates a file "that is readable by Microsoft Excel in Europe, i.e., the default encoding is WINDOWS-1252 and the separator is ;".

I understand this is only a default, and it can be overridden using environment variables.

However, I suggest that the default should be changed to UTF-8 and the more standard comma-separated values, for the following reasons:

• Current versions of Excel have no issues importing UTF-8 / comma-separated - you just have to use File > Import. When prompted for an encoding, select "Unicode (UTF-8)" from the list, and for Delimiters select "Comma". This works for me on Microsoft Excel for Mac Version 16
• Not everyone is using Microsoft Excel
• Not everyone is in Europe
• Not every Excel user in Europe is using Windows (especially not Things users!), hence WINDOWS-1252 is often not the default encoding anyway

The funny thing is, I am in Europe and I am using Excel. But the default encoding still corrupts my data. Why? Because I use lots Unicode characters in my task notes like bullets, ticks, crosses, arrows, currency signs, emoji, foreign words, special characters, etc.

Remember Things is a Unicode app, and its SQLite database uses UTF-8.

The CSV export function should follow the principle of least surprise, and preserve users' Unicode notes data in its default setting. It should not corrupt or mangle their data by default.

Installing via brew gives the following error:

/usr/local/bin/things.sh: line 176: @: unbound variable

Great tool - exactly what I have been looking for.

Not sure if I am using the CSV export correctly. When opened, the type 0 tasks appear to only be able to to have one of 'Project', 'Area' or 'Heading' populated. It seems to choose the lowest level available where present. Is this an error or am I simply not using the output correctly?

Many thanks

I'm having trouble getting the CSV export to work properly. I assume that exporting all notes is breaking the behaviour because it also dumps the xml tags that wrap the note from the database, therefore also including the double quotes from <note xml:space="preserve"> and any other tags included within the note. Is there a way to sanitise the output by stripping tags?

I realise that, perhaps, makes this less useful but if it is the cause of csv formatting errors then it would then display properly.

Hi, it seems that the CSV export does not handle repeating tasks correctly.

I became suspicious when I noticed that my Things DB has 52 repeating tasks and the CSV export only has 11 rows where Recurring=TRUE. Those 11 appear to be repeating tasks which all have zero completed instances with the same title.

If a repeating task has one or more completed instances with the same title, then weird behaviour occurs. For example: consider a repeating task with five completed instances, all having with the same title and same tag "next".

• Expected behaviour: the CSV contains 6 rows relating to this task, one for the repeating task itself, and five for the completed instances - all with same tag "next"
• Actual behaviour: The CSV contains only 1 row relating to this task, with Recurring=FALSE. The completion date matches only the most recent completed instance. The tag field has the value "next,next,next,next,next,next".

The number of duplicated tag names in the tag field matches the expected (but not actual) number of rows in the CSV.

Completed instances seem to work OK only if their titles have been edited (so they're different from the parent task), but not when they share the same title as their parent task.

After the recent fix for the URIs of subtasks, I have attempted to update via brew twice, and I believe this has not been updated to reflect the fix? Thanks in advance.

The schedule.sh plugin won't run with python3. I've changed my local copy to correct the issue.
current
title="$(python -c 'import urllib, sys; print urllib.quote(sys.argv[1])' "${array[3]}")"
changed to
title="$(python -c 'import urllib.parse, sys; print(urllib.parse.quote(sys.argv[1]))' "${array[3]}")"

Cultured Code moved the Things db in 3.12.6 to ~/Library/Group Containers. Subsequently, things.sh fails locating the file:

$ things.sh today
Error: file is not a database
ERROR: line 1 - command 'eval "${!method}"' exited with status: 26.
ERROR: In ::queryToday::invokePlugin::parse::main::main called at line 48.
DEBUG: From function ::queryToday::invokePlugin::parse::main::main (line 48).

replacing
readonly DEFAULT_DB=~/Library/Containers/com.culturedcode.ThingsMac/Data/Library/Application\ Support/Cultured\ Code/Things/Things.sqlite3
with
readonly DEFAULT_DB="/Library/Group Containers/JLMPQHK86H.com.culturedcode.ThingsMac/Things.sqlite3"
restored access for me, though I don't know if the JLMPQHK86H part is unique per user...

I exported on my MacBook Pro running OS12.3 Monteray using the command in your readme:
things.sh csv > Things3Export.csv && open Things3Export.csv

It worked perfectly, except a large percentage of the rows have empty Area and Project fields. This makes it impossible for me to import them into Evernote directly into the "notebooks" I want to transfer to.

Is there a modified command that would force them to appear?

Also, how can I export omitting the completed and duplicate tasks?

Thanks very much for making this possible!!

Manny

The CSV export shows checklist items looking almost identical to their parent tasks. This makes it extremely difficult to distinguish checklist items (which are like mini-tasks inside a task) from actual tasks.

This means you cannot, for example, filter out checklist items to see only tasks in Excel, or vice versa.

Checklist items have the same Title and URI as their parent task in the CSV. The Subtask column is always empty, regardless whether it's a checklist item or task. Checklist items do not have tags - but neither do some tasks, so this isn't a reliable way to distinguish them.

The only difference I can see is this:

• in a task, the Notes field contains the task's notes
• in a checklist item, the Notes field contains the name of the checklist item

However the notes field and checklist item names are both free text fields in Things.app. This means you cannot distinguish tasks from checklist items in the CSV, unless you remember what you wrote in those fields, which is different for each task and does not scale.

Ideally, checklist items would not only be distinguishable, but also appear directly underneath the task they relate to in the CSV (although that's probably harder to implement).

An alternative would be to list all checklist items for a given task in a single multi-line cell, so a task and all its checklist items have only one row in the CSV.

Thank you for this awesome application. I have a couple of tasks which have notes but no titles. All except for one seem to be ignored when exporting the Things database via things.sh csv > Things3Export.csv && open Things3Export.csv. It would be great if the export would contain all tasks - regardless whether they have a title or not.

It looks like the tap hasn’t been updated in a while and is still set to version 2.3. It also looks like there hasn’t been a “release” in a while (since 2.5). Is brew no longer the best way to install things.sh? I tried cloning the repository and using make install, but that doesn’t take care of the plugins (and makes me wonder if other steps might be missed going that way).

It would be great to search for tasks with a specific tag (not just "Waiting For"). In my use case this would be useful to extract tasks which I've marked "important" and want to do this week

I have exported my things data t excel, but I cant see how to identify tasks that are in the trash, they appear in the list with all others and there doesn't appear to be a field that identifies them as trashed.

Cultured Code changed DB location to

readonly DEFAULT_DB="${HOME}/Library/Group Containers/JLMPQHK86H.com.culturedcode.ThingsMac/Things Database.thingsdatabase/main.sqlite"

• New location on help doc: https://culturedcode.com/things/support/articles/2982272/
• Release notes: https://culturedcode.com/things/support/articles/1100684/

@AlexanderWillner Ping me if you'd like me to submit a pull request or push a fix yourself.

Thanks!

Hello Alex & thank you! Your code works splendidly.

For items that are ordered by <date>, would it be possible to export the date as well?

For instance, with '$ things.sh completed' command, having the ability to export the 'creationDate' and/or** 'Completion Date'** alongside would be great for logging completed tasks.

Potentially many others find this information very useful. Thanks for considering Alex!

It would be nice if output could include project names and possibly headings. E.g. when I’m showing ‘next’ actions is now hard to discern tasks in separate projects