[HN Gopher] Vikunja - The open-source, self-hostable to-do app
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Vikunja - The open-source, self-hostable to-do app
Author : fgrsnau
Score : 111 points
Date : 2023-01-21 18:53 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (vikunja.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (vikunja.io)
| bioemerl wrote:
| I'm biased.
|
| I'm making a tool that's kind of like this one. Please keep that
| in mind, because I'm about to give a whole bunch of criticism
| here.
|
| First things first, the UX and UI is really neat and there's lots
| of really good design and thought put into how fast the app is
| and how well it is handling a whole bunch of users. I was sitting
| in there with everyone in hacker news creating tasks and it was
| keeping up amazingly.
|
| But my first impression using this is that it's going to need a
| lot more work on the depth of the features rather than the
| breath.
|
| It looks sleek and it's got lots of options on a task, but when
| you click through one of the options they are very bare bones.
| There is a depth of interaction that is missing.
|
| One example, I click on the time to task option, and it gives me
| an option for repetition, but repetition comes in the form of day
| month or year. What happens if I want something to repeat every
| Tuesday, or every second month on the 5th? You just can't do it.
| You can repeat tasks, but because it's not powerful enough it's a
| system that's not going to be useful in a lot of cases.
|
| Taking my trash out happens every Tuesday. If I were to want to
| abandon my current system to use this app I would no longer be
| able to do that.
|
| Another thing that struck me was the percentage/progress option.
| When I click the progress box I got a drop down list with
| increments of 10 which i could pick from. That was way less than
| I was expecting from a feature like that.
|
| There are two criticisms here.
|
| The first is that I expected a progress system to be something of
| a system. Imagine having progress that is tied to the number of
| check boxes I've checked off, something that's not another manual
| thing that I have to click and keep track of.
|
| But if it's going to just be a number entry, why is it only a
| number entry for progress? This could have been part of a bigger
| more powerful system that I can use to fit my needs.
|
| I'm not thinking "oh hey look I can keep it percentage", I'm more
| thinking "oh hey look I can't keep track of the amount of money I
| spent this week".
|
| Something as plain as a drop down with a bunch of numbers should
| never be a dedicated feature.
|
| Percentage option doesn't hurt, but when you add little features
| like that instead of bigger systems, you're going to find that
| you get lots of people wanting to add new little features to fit
| their use cases. This will especially be true when the app is
| open source and everyone has the ability to go in and add that on
| their own.
|
| Final criticism. There's a little bit of a disconnect in how you
| add a lot of stuff to a task.
|
| Take relations as an example. I click add relation, and nothing
| happens. I sit confused for a while, until I notice that the
| related tasks has already appeared in the main task window and
| now I need to click the plus in order to start creating a
| relationship.
|
| All of those options in the right side bar which open items in
| the left sidebar could be in the left side bar from the start.
| When I click that button that starts the addition of relations to
| a task the app should start a process where I am now creating a
| relation, not popping up a new section. This way you have a
| direct connection between where I clicked to add a new thing, and
| the process for adding that new thing.
|
| Everything I say here is easily fixed, so it's not at all the end
| of the world. I'm sure the developers of this system can easily
| fix every single issue I mentioned. Don't take this as me saying
| the app is bad, but there are a lot of flaws here that make me
| hesitant to throw away what I've worked on.
| malermeister wrote:
| Looks promising! Does it have mobile apps or even better, support
| for standard protocols like CalDAV or Etesync?
| kolaente wrote:
| CalDAV works but not with all tools. Check out the docs for
| more: https://vikunja.io/docs/caldav/
| fgrsnau wrote:
| A mobile app is work in progress[1]. I am currently using the
| web interface which is quite usable on a mobile phone. Lists
| work quite nicely, also on smaller screens. I was using
| Kanboard previously and mobile usage was a bit too complicated.
|
| CalDAV seems to be supported[2]. I have not tried it (yet).
|
| [1]: https://github.com/go-vikunja/app
|
| [2]: https://vikunja.io/docs/caldav/
| [deleted]
| halfdan wrote:
| Funny. I just stumbled upon this yesterday. The only thing that I
| wish to see improved is having the backend serve the frontend
| from the same docker container. It's a bit of a hassle to use
| nginx as a proxy in the docker compose setup (or in fact set all
| of that up on my Synology NAS).
| fgrsnau wrote:
| Initially I was also interested in this. There is the
| staticpath option in the backend config. You can point it to
| the directory of the frontend files. Theoretically, both the
| backend and the frontend could be served by the builtin
| webserver. Unfortunately, for this to work most frontend URLs
| must get rewritten/rerouted to /index.html and this does not
| seem to be implemented. Shouldn't be too complicated though.
| darkteflon wrote:
| I've been a paying Todoist customer for many years. For some
| reason, they steadfastly refuse to introduce blocking/blocked by
| flags.
|
| It seems so strange to me to do all the hard work of allowing
| arbitrarily nested projects and tasks, sub-tasks, labels, complex
| filters and collaboration, but then not do dependencies. Imo
| dependencies is the big difference between something you can use
| on complex projects, and a "mere" to-do list - even one with
| nested projects, labels, filters, whatever.
|
| I thought that perhaps I wanted a Gantt chart tool and spent a
| couple of months going down that route. At least in my
| experience, though, what I actually wanted was just some way to
| establish a DAG - I didn't even necessarily need a way to
| visualise it, just the ability to group and filter on it.
|
| Vikunja looks interesting - open source, self-hosted and supports
| dependencies/relations. No iOS mobile client at this time,
| though.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| This. To me, it seems like a weird market blind spot. Most of
| the tools in this space can't even do a proper tree - typically
| they limit you to 2-4 levels, like "project", "task", "subtask"
| and "checklist". The few that don't, stick to the tree model,
| even though work naturally structures itself into a DAG.
|
| From the other end, I know MS Project has pretty much all the
| things you need, but has questionable UX, is quite buggy (I've
| personally managed to brick it after running auto-scheduling on
| a project with ~20 tasks...). There probably exist tools with
| the correct representation, perhaps even better UX - but I've
| never heard of any. Neither did a project manager I know, in a
| decades-old company with well established "classical
| engineering" culture, which includes all the PMBOK-related
| concept space.
|
| And if I'm doing my semi-regular project management rant once
| again (a subset of more general ranting that, on Mastodon, I
| started to tag as #ItsAGraph, #NotATree), let me pile on some
| extra wishlist items: counterfactual modelling, conditionals,
| probabilities. That is, expressing the idea that there are
| alternative strategies to pursue, and which one to take depends
| on information available only partway through the project.
| dmje wrote:
| I miss the days where app installation was just "unzip, edit the
| config file, upload to your web server and hit up the install
| page". Now it's all Docker and gulp and build and urgh soooo
| complicated.
| layer8 wrote:
| I miss the days when you could install most things via apt-get
| and thus have security updates automated, documentation in a
| standard location, and so on.
| smlacy wrote:
| Couldn't agree more! The real irony is that usually it's sold
| as "Docker makes installing, upgrading and maintaining easier."
| Kwpolska wrote:
| Running an arbitrary thing in Docker is far easier than
| without it. If I want to run the PHP/MySQL-based Matomo, I
| can just grab the ready-made docker-compose.yml [0] and tell
| my main nginx to proxy_pass onto it. I don't need to figure
| out how to configure MySQL/MariaDB/PHP-FPM and what hacks did
| my distro introduce to it (at least I'm not using
| Debian/Ubuntu, so there shouldn't be that many). Similarly, I
| can get Zulip in Docker [1] (even if it's apparently in alpha
| state) and not mess with the Python packaging trainwreck, and
| also setting up all of Redis, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ and
| memcached.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/matomo-
| org/docker/tree/master/.examples/n...
|
| [1]: https://github.com/zulip/docker-zulip
| daedric7 wrote:
| I'm sorry, but it does. Docker compose at least.
| tryfinally wrote:
| I host tens of self-hosted apps for various purposes, including
| ones similar to this one, all via docker-compose. Setting up
| new ones is a breeze (thanks to Traefik), backing up the
| configuration and data is trivial, upgrading to the latest
| version takes a few minutes at most. I'm confident my workflow
| is simpler and more convenient than yours. Granted, the initial
| investment to learn and understand the tools is pretty large.
| schemescape wrote:
| Any chance you could outline your process? E.g. if you had to
| start from a new VM, what all would you need to do?
|
| I've always just set everything up via the command line, and
| it's tedious/not repeatable (and there's also no isolation).
| I'm sure there's a better way, but usually the solutions I
| see involve gluing together a bunch of different tools--
| possibly even more work than I'm already doing (although
| there are benefits!).
| feanaro wrote:
| I miss the days when app installation had nothing to do with
| web servers.
| [deleted]
| bioemerl wrote:
| Docker is crazy simple, I love it.
| anthropodie wrote:
| What I don't like about Docker is it does not respect the
| firewall rules that I setup using something like ufw.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| Docker is crazy simple _if everything works as it should._
| Otherwise it can be crazy not-simple.
| fgrsnau wrote:
| In this specific case it is not very complicated and actually
| pretty close to unzip, edit config and run. I have deployed it
| on a Raspberry running FreeBSD, so Docker is not an option.
|
| The backend server is written in Go and after building it only
| a single binary has to be deployed. A second repository
| contains the frontend (HTML, JS) which you copy to a path that
| you make available via your webserver. That's basically it.
| flo123456 wrote:
| If you run NixOS you get a similar experience because it's
| often just services.foo.enable = true; edit a couple options to
| your needs and you're good to go. :-)
| aaviator42 wrote:
| Some of us still write code like that :P
|
| https://github.com/aaviator42/izi
| dkarter wrote:
| I love vikunja. I set it up on my raspberry pi and been using it
| daily
| princevegeta89 wrote:
| Is it only for todos or can we take regular notes on it as
| well?
| layer8 wrote:
| The good thing is it has an API so you can write your own client
| for it.
| margarina72 wrote:
| This looks brilliant, seriously. All oss trello/todoist
| alternatives are either hard to use, or missing features, this
| looks like it has it all. Even a backend in go. On my todo list
| of things to try.
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(page generated 2023-01-21 23:00 UTC)