General feedback after trying out Vikunja

Support
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First of all, props to the author for making this. After evaluating tons of task management tools, Vikunja has made it to my short list. It appears that this is mostly a one-person passion project, so you should be proud of what you’ve built!

Here is some general feedback based on trying this out as my main task management tool (for personal projects and day-to-day tasks) for about a week. I’d be happy to elaborate on any of these points if it would be useful.

Features I like

Here are some of the key things I was looking for that Vikunja already offers.

Must-have:

  • Both list and kanban-like views
    • This immediately ruled out over half of the candidate tools that only had one view or the other.
  • Subtasks
  • Labels/tags

Strongly biased toward, but negotiable:

  • Self-hosted
  • Reasonably fast client-side performance (i.e., not Jira)
  • Custom filters

Nice to have:

  • Easy to deploy with docker-compose
  • Nested projects
  • Attachments
  • Not too bloated with enterprise project management features that aren’t relevant for personal tasks (i.e., not Jira)

Things I wasn’t specifically looking for, but I’m happy are available:

  • Quick add attributes (labels, date/time, etc.)
  • Keyboard shortcuts
  • webhooks
  • CalDAV integration

Wanted features

Here are some additional features that I would love to see. This isn’t a list of demands, but more to give you an idea of my initial impressions. I might later add a couple of these as feature requests with more details.

  • Status as a top-level field: It looks like status (or “Bucket”) is only visible in Kanban view. I’d like to be able to use this in:
    • saved filters (example: filter to view all “In Progress” tasks across all boards)
    • task edit view
    • table view
    • Example apps: GitHub issues + projects (partially), Jira
  • Subtasks as a top-level field: Separate from Description, with quicker entry/editing (without needing to click ‘Edit’ under Description)
    • Example apps: Microsoft To Do (formerly Wunderlist), Todoist, Planka, Jira
  • Label quick filter: Click on a label to instantly see all tasks with that label
    • Example apps: GitHub issues, GitLab issues, Gitea issues, Jira
  • Bulk edit: Select multiple tasks and add/edit labels, status, priority, etc.
    • Example apps: GitHub issues, GitLab issues, Gitea issues, Jira, Trello

And some additional, less important features that would be nice to have:

  • Quick filter for combined parent + child project tasks
  • Improved markdown support: I’d find it useful to edit descriptions/comments in markdown, in addition to the current WYSIWYG text editor
    • Example: Reddit comment text editor (“Markdown Mode” vs “Fancy Pants Editor”)
    • Looks like you’re already using tiptap; this may be possible with the tiptap-markdown plugin
  • Drag & drop tasks between projects
  • Mobile app with widget to quickly add tasks from device’s home page
    • Example apps: To Do, Todoist
3 Likes
2

Thank you for the feedback.

Please do!

There is a (rather old) issue about this already: #537 - [Feature Request] Be able to change KanBan buckets for a task from within the task. - frontend - Gitea

Do you mean the task relations or the checklists?

From the label overview page, or from the task detail page?

The editor supports markdown shortcuts. Might not be obvious, but please give it a try.

1 Like
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Thanks for the quick reply!

Oh, I meant checklists. Something like this:

I make heavy use of subtasks, so anything that makes it even a little faster to add/edit them makes a big difference for me!

Ideally from anywhere a label is displayed, but any kind of shortcut would be welcome. For example, in GitHub Issues, clicking on a “bug” label from either the main issue list or issue detail page takes you to a quick filter showing all issues with that label.

I see I can enter markdown and it gets rendered as I type. But if I try to paste multiple lines of markdown, for example:

* item 1
* item 2
    * nested item

**bold** _italic_  ~~strikethrough~~ `inline code`

# h1
## h2
### h3

```sh
echo 'code snippet'
```

Most of it won’t get rendered, except for the inline markup:

image
image832×685 20.2 KB

And, once rendered to HTML, it can’t be edited as markdown.

It’s possible an existing plugin (tiptap-markdown) might do what I’m looking for, so I’ll play around with that when I have the time.

1 Like
4

If you’re into keyboard shortcuts, you can press e to edit the description and then use [] at the beginning of a line to create a new checklist item.

We’ve discussed this in the past but only about clicking on the label in the label overview page. There you have the problem that you’d need a way to click on the task to bring up the edit form so we discarded that idea. Using the label on the task sounds like a good idea though, I’ve added an item to the backlog about this.

I’ve looked at the plugin you linked but it wasn’t exactly clear to me from their readme how that’s different from the markdown shortcuts shipped with tiptap core. Would love to hear what you find out.

1 Like
5

I like very much how todoist behave about this: if you click on a label at label overview you go to a filtered tasks page but when you hover the mouse over the label it displays a edit icon.

Very intuitive and useful.

2 Likes
6

+1 for Markdown support

we found some issues, like:

  • Markdown contents not migrated correctly when upgrade
    • we currently are using v0.21.0 in docker, with a fine Markdown support
    • after upgrade (had tried both v0.21.0 to v0.22.0 and v0.21.0 to v0.23.0), some Markdown contents would be wrong rendered, e.g.
      • task style list item
      • list item inline quoted content
    • sometimes even, impossible to back to plain edit mode

I would find time to add some pictures…

7

+1 to the markdown editor. It can be difficult to get a WYSIWYG editor to behave correctly (like where specifically bold, underline, strikethrough start and end, link formatting, check lists and indentation (especially when copy-pasting), etc.). Having a raw markdown editor that is then converted to html would be really helpful for this.

8

Second the widget, its the only. way i use todoist, put in on my home screen to remind me of what i need to do.

9

If you’re an iOS user, I have built a widget using scriptable

10

That’s cool! Could you share that?