Doing File

The file that stores all of your entries is generated the first time you add an entry (with doing now or doing later). By default, the file is created in ~/.local/share/doing/what_was_i_doing.md, but you can modify this in the config file. To see the location of your Doing file, run doing config get doing_file.

The format of the "doing" file is TaskPaper-compatible. You can edit it by hand at any time (in TaskPaper or any text editor), but it uses a specific format for parsing, so be sure to maintain the dates and pipe characters.

Notes are anything in the list without a leading hyphen and date. They belong to the entry directly before them, and they should be indented one level beyond the parent item.

When using the now and later commands on the command line, you can start the entry with a quote and hit return, then type the note and close the quote. Anything after the first line will be turned into a TaskPaper-compatible note for the task and can be displayed in templates using %note.

Notes can be prevented from ever appearing in output with the global option --no-notes: doing --no-notes show all.

Auto tagging (adding tags listed in .doingrc under autotag and default_tags) can be skipped for an entry with the -x global option: doing -x done skipping some automatic tagging.

Opening the Doing File

You can open the Doing file in an editor by running doing open. The editor used will be determined by the configuration setting editors.doing_file. This is empty by default and falls back to your $EDITOR variable.

To assign an editor for the Doing file, use doing config set editors.doing_file TaskPaper, substituting TaskPaper with whatever editor you want to use. It can be a command line tool like vim or any app that can take a file path using your system's version of the open command (open on Mac, xdg-open on some other systems). This editor setting does not affect the command line editor called with --editor when inputting entries on the command line. (The default editor needs to be able to wait for the file to close, but the doing_file editor can be any app.)