One important concept is to identify tasks effortlessly with recognizable, consistent alphabetical ids. To distinguish them clearly from the unique ids (uuid/ulid) and potential ids of the plumber, they will henceforth be called user-ids.
These ids are always lowercase. Note that they only have to unique among open tasks. Closed tasks loose their userid and will have a new one generated should they be reactivated.
- Generate an index of the task description: An array of all uppercase letters and initials.
- If there is a parent task with a user-id, take its first letter as start of the id. Remove the first letter of the index if it is identical.
- Find consecutive letters (preferably among the uppercase letters) in the index that yield a unique id with a length of 2-3.
- Take up to 3 letters of the description and see if they create a unique id.
- Otherwise, find a random combination of 2-3 characters that isn't used yet.
Example:
Configure my ArchLinux properly
Index:
CmALp
Generated ids, in order:
ca
al
cal
cm
ma
lp
cma
mal
alp
co
con
If there is a parent with the id c:
ca
cl
cal
cm
cp
co
con
Taskwarrior UDA: userid