Getting Things GNOME 0.5 To-Do App Released with Recurring Tasks, Performance Improvements

Getting Things GNOME 0.5

Jeff Fortin Tam’s Getting Things GNOME (GTG) open-source and free personal tasks and to-do list app has received a new major update today, version 0.5, which adds numerous new features and improvements.

It’s been about nine months since Getting Things GNOME 0.4 was released as a massive update after more than six years of development, and now your favorite personal tasks and to-do app gets another major release, Getting Things GNOME 0.5, bringing user experience refinements, revamped file format and task editor, performance improvements, and killer new features.

The biggest new feature in the Getting Things GNOME 0.5 release is the ability to create recurring (repeating) tasks. This is indeed a must-have feature for any personal tasks, calendar, or to-do app, and I personally can’t imagine leaving without it. For those who don’t know what recurring tasks are, the feature lets you set automatic reminders (recurrence) for a certain task every day, every other day, as well as weekly, monthly, and yearly.

 Another new feature in Getting Things GNOME 0.5 is support for emojis as tag icons instead of icon-based emblems. Besides being visually appealing, one major advantage of this feature is better support for HiDPI displays since emojis come in a scalable format. On the downside, you will have to manually choose new emoji for your tasks after upgrading from version 0.4 to 0.5 as the old emblems are gone.

The Task Editor received quite some improvements in this update as it’s been rewritten to make the timeout-based parser faster, add support for GTK checkboxes to subtasks, display completed subtasks with a normal strikethrough text style, add support for subheadings in Markdown format, and implement support for automatic closing of parent task when opening subtasks and vice versa.

Among the user interface (UI) improvements implemented in Getting Things GNOME 0.5, there’s a dark mode toggle in the preferences, the ability to add parent tasks to an existing task by right-clicking in the task browser window, the ability to delete closed tasks directly from the main window, the ability to remember the last used view, as well as a new, one-size-fits-all flat-styled logo that matches GNOME’s more recent icon style.

As with all new releases, there are also numerous bug fixes and performance improvements to make the to-do app faster, more stable, and more reliable, so you can focus only on being more productive rather than getting annoyed that it doesn’t work the way you want it to. More details on these internal changes are available on the release announcement page for my tech-savvy readers.

Getting Things GNOME 0.5 is available for download right now from the project’s GitHub page as a source tarball for Linux OS integrators who want to offer this great personal tasks and to-do app to their users, as well as from Flathub as a Flatpak app that can be installed by anyone on virtually any GNU/Linux distribution.

Image credits: Jeff Fortin Tam

Last updated 3 years ago

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