I was think about switching from #Things to #TaskPaper. Task-management is the last piece where I still don’t use plain text, albeit using Markdown in Things notes (see 2023-12-09_12-09 Things to-do journaling template).

• Why I like Things
  • Nice UI
  • #Markdown support in notes
  • Really good #Shortcuts integration
  • iOS and iPadOS versions, which are at the same level of excellence
  • There is a link to everything
  • No attachments
    • People tend to dislike this. Having no attachments support forces me to have better attachment management in dedicated apps like DEVONthink
• Why I don’t like Things
  • Uses a database
    • Backing Up Your To-Dos - Things Support
    • Every item in the TMTask table includes projects, headers, and to-dos
  • Sync is not end-to-end encrypted
  • No Spotlight integration
    • On the Mac, I periodically run a script which creates .hook files linking back to projects as way to have a fake Spotlight index.
      • 2023-12-10_08-22 Indexing Things with Spotlight

Knowing that the database is fairly easy to understand, I’m a bit more confident that I can export my to-dos out of Things. I can even use the SQLite database directly as an archival format too.

The non-existence of end-to-end encryption is still bugs me though.