I manage various projects and not all of their tasks end up in Things, my default task manager. For all coding projects, for example, I like to keep a list of todos in a simple markdown file called TODO.md.

This is for various reasons, among which:

• some of these tasks are not that important, they’re just a maybe/someday reminder
• it’s easier to ask Claude to help me out with these tasks if they’re already in the project folder in text format

Most of the CLI tools i found online are an over-kill for what I need ¹ but, after a bit of searching, I found one that does almost exactly what I want: mdt.

mdt is inspired by t but it’s a “bit less nerdy"" since it offers an interactive TUI (Terminal User Interface) and uses simple markdown files with checkboxes.

It ticks all the boxes:

• Each project has its own list of tasks, stored in a TODO.md file
• It’s focused since, when working on a project, I only see tasks from that project
• It emphasises adding and completing tasks, instead of managing them ²
• It’s nice to look at and to use
• I can edit and manage tasks in bulk using any text-editor

Still, mdt has some shortcomings and it’s not been updated in a few years. For this reason I’ve now forked the repo on GitHub and started modifying it to fit my workflow a bit better and fix some bugs. A few examples:

• mdt "Buy milk" — add task directly from command line
• mdt -l — list tasks with numbers and summary (scans subfolders)
• mdt -l keyword — filter tasks containing “keyword”
• mdt -c 2 — toggle task 2 complete/incomplete
• mdt -d 3 — delete task 3
• mdt -e — open in default editor (or mdt -e 2 to jump to task 2)
• mdt --clear — remove all completed tasks
• ESC navigates back instead of quitting
• Works with TODO.md files that have no headers
• Opens default markdown app on macOS when no $EDITOR is set

Feel free to follow the project and contribute but be aware that I don’t plan on adding a lot more since I want to stick to this core concept:

It’s easy to say “I’ll just organize my todo list a bit” and spend 15 minutes tagging your tasks. In those 15 minutes you probably could have finished a couple of them.

t was inspired by j. It’s simple, messy, has almost no features, and is extremely effective at the one thing it does. With t the only way to make your todo list prettier is to finish some damn tasks. ³