Apr 25, 2012

CoffeeScript Lately+ Add-on for Todo.txt

Unsatistied by the ramp-up time and extra libraries needed to run my todo.txt lately+ add-on posted in the last blog post, I decided to write a CoffeeScript version for Node.js. I thought it would avoid the ramp-up needed for groovyclient and be faster to boot.

One of the good things about building on top of Node is that you have alot of libraries to draw upon. A quick Google search surfaced a libraries to parse and manipulate dates in a way similar to Groovy and another to produce colored console text, moment and colors reqpectively. Both of the aforementioned are available as npm packages. To run our script, we need to install the dependencies along with our todotxt-coffee package.

    npm install moment
    npm install colors
    npm install todotxt-coffee

We can see that much of the heavy lifting is done by the CoffeeScript library and most of the logic below is determining what and how to print it. colors decorates strings with a properties for a base set of colors and styling(underline, bold, italic, etc) but you can create your own as well.

   printTask = (d,r) ->
        console.log d.format('YYYY-MM-DD').green + r.yellow

    printTasks = () ->
        if project is undefined
            for task in todos.list
                date = moment(task.date().toString().trim())
                restOfLine = task.raw().substr(12)

                printTask(date, restOfLine) if startDate <= date
        else
                tasks = todos.byProject(project)
                for t in tasks
                    date = moment(t.date().toString().trim())
                    restOfLine = t.raw().substr(12)
                    printTask(date, restOfLine) if startDate <= date

This and my other add-ons live here