Tagging
Doing uses TaskPaper @tags for searching and filtering, as well as for time tracking. Just include @tags in the text of your entries to make them searchable, sortable, and trackable.
For example, tag a an entry with @coding and @project1 by running doing now @coding a new plugin for @project1, and another entry with doing now @coding some stuff for @project2. Now you can display both entries with doing show @coding, or just show a single project's entries with doing show @project1. All of the display and view commands allow combining tags with AND, OR, or NOT booleans.
doing tag adds one or more tags to the last entry, or specify a count with -c X. Tags are specified as basic arguments, separated by spaces. For example:
doing tag -c 3 client cancelled
... will mark the last three entries as @client @cancelled. Add -r as a switch to remove the listed tags instead. Use --search to add tags based on search results, and you can do interactive batch tagging using doing select.
You can also have tags added automatically based on keywords. See Autotagging.
The @done tag is the only tag Doing mandates internally. This is added to an entry when you mark it finished, and the timestamp is included as a tag value in parenthesis, e.g. @done(2021-12-23 05:35). Any tag can have a value, but at present Doing doesn't have any means of querying based on tag values.
Doing can also flag entries. By default it uses @flagged, but this can be changed in the configuration. You can add a @flagged tag to the last note with doing flag. Remove a flag with doing flag -r.
Each tag used gets an elapsed time (the time between the entry creation and the value of the @done tag) recorded for every entry it appears on. When running display commands, you can use --totals to see the total time tracked for each tag.
doing show --totals outputs something like:
The show command can display entries containing specific tags just by prefixing an argument with @. doing show @work will show all entries tagged @work. You can have multiple tag arguments and combine them with booleans (and, or, not). For example, to show all entries tagged both @personal and @writing:
doing show @personal @writing --bool and
Most commands accept a --tag flag. For example, if you wanted to repeat an entry yesterday tagged @marvelous, you would run doing again --tag marvelous, and the last entry tagged @marvelous would be duplicated as a new entry. Multiple tags can be combined with commas, and you can define the boolean using --bool with and, or, or not.
doing again --tag work,project1 --bool and
doing cancel --tag work,writing --bool or
Tags can have values appended in parenthesis. The @done tag is an example of this, where @done(2022-01-15 12:00) has a date value. A value can be any text or number. For example, you can track progress on something using @progress(50) or @completed(25%), or define a scope using @context(Work) or @context(Personal).
When adding tags with doing tag, you can include --value VAL to specify a value for the new tag, e.g. doing tag context --value Personal would add @context(Personal) to the last entry. When including tags in the entry title, just add the parenthesis and the value inline. If more than one tag is passed as an argument, the value will be applied to all of them, so this is best used with a single tag. If the tag already exists, its value will be updated.
You can use tag values when displaying entries by including the --val QUERY flag. The QUERY consists of a tag name, a comparator, and a value. For example, to find all entries with a @done date in the last two weeks, you could use doing show --val "done < 2 weeks ago". Multiple --val flags can be used in a single command. By default these are combined and all value queries must succeed for an entry to be shown. You can change this using --bool OR to match on any of the queries, or --bool NOT to skip matching queries. In most cases you can also use --not to invert the results.
For numeric/date comparisons, you can use < (less than), > (greater than), >= (greater than or equal), <= (less than or equal), or == (equal). For date comparisons, natural language is processed, so you can use done < fri at 5pm and it will find all entries with a done date before Friday at 5pm. Numeric comparisons allow decimals, and percent symbols are ignored. progress < 50% would still match @progress(45).
For string comparisons, you can use == (full string match), ^= (starts with), $= (ends with), and *= (partial match). All string comparisons are case insensitive, and you can use wildcards (? and *) in the value (e.g. --val "project == proj*"). You can also use basic regular expression syntax (but not ? or *, as those are reserved for wildcards), so if you wanted to match @atag(value1) and @atag(value3), you could use atag == value[13].