Intro
This is about taskdog, my own CLI/TUI task manager.
I archive tasks once they’re done — but until now, the TUI task list couldn’t show archived ones at all. Every time I thought “wait, where did that task I finished last week go?”, I had to drop to the CLI to find it. Mildly annoying, every time. So I made them visible. A trivial little feature, but I’m logging it as one of those small accretions.
What I did: Toggle Archive
I just added a Toggle Archive entry to the command palette. The implementation is almost embarrassingly thin.
The TUI state carries a single show_archived: bool = False, and that flag gets passed when fetching tasks:
self.repository.list_tasks( include_archived=self.state.show_archived,)Running the toggle flips show_archived and the list re-fetches. That’s it. The include_archived path already existed on the CLI side, so the TUI is really just pulling that switch up into the UI.
As a feature, that’s genuinely all of it. But the gap between “can’t see them” and “toggle to see them” feels much larger than the diff, for a tool you reach for every day.
Bonus: a fixed-width time window for the Gantt
In the same change I also fixed the Gantt chart. It used to render the whole live range, so once history accumulated — archived tasks included — the column count kept growing, and panning into the past would freeze the chart.
Textual’s DataTable has no column virtualization, so more columns means proportionally more render cost. There’s no clean way to shave that off.
So I changed the approach to pan a fixed-width time window:
H/Lshift the window one week into the past / future;Tsnaps back to the current week.- The window width is constant, so the rendered column count is constant too — meaning render cost stays flat no matter how much history piles up.
If there’s no virtualization, then just don’t grow the number of columns you draw. Cursor and scroll position are preserved across pan and zoom rebuilds.
Wrap-up
It’s a small change — just making archived tasks visible — but it cleared the Gantt’s rendering ceiling along the way. Small accretions like this are what grow a tool.