Temporary Tasks and the Stack
You may find yourself needing to temporarily pause your current task to work on another, with the
intent to come right back. This kind of interrupt happens so commonly, that I added functionality to
the timelog system early on to deal with it.
The concept of a stack is fairly well-known to developers, but may not be as comfortable to
non-developers. A stack makes it easy to deal with temporarily saving something and restoring it
later. The useful property of a stack is that you can push multiple things on a stack and then
easily remove them in the opposite order. This is known as a “last in, first out” process.
Stack Usage
The push command saves the current task to the stack, and changes to supplied task.
$ rtimelog curr
2023-10-24 20:10 +projA @Code
Duration: 1:23
$ rtimelog stack top
$ rtimelog push +projA @Meeting
$ rtimelog curr
2023-10-24 21:33 +projA @Meeting
Duration: 0:00
$ rtimelog stack top
+projA @Code
When you are ready to come back to the previous task, you use the resume command.
$ rtimelog resume
$ rtimelog curr
2023-10-24 21:40 +projA @Code
Duration: 0:00
$ rtimelog stack top
When you find yourself toggling between two tasks for some reason, the swap command uses the stack
in a more advanced way.
Assuming we start work on the Foo project.
$ rtimelog start +Foo @Monitor
$ rtimelog curr
+Foo @Monitor
$ rtimelog stack top
Later, we want to push the Bar project.
$ rtimelog push +Bar @Monitor
$ rtimelog curr
2023-10-24 21:53 +Bar @Monitor
Duration: 0:00
$ rtimelog stack top
+Foo @Monitor
Next, we want to go back the Foo project, knowing that we will come back to Bar shortly. We can
use swap for that, and we’ll use the tools to see the log and the stack.
$ rtimelog swap
$ rtimelog curr
2023-10-24 21:54 +Bar @Monitor
Duration: 0:00
$ rtimelog stack top
+Foo @Monitor
Notice that Foo and Bar have swapped places.
Stack Reporting
To see the task descriptions on the stack, use the stack ls.
$ rtimelog stack ls
If you just want to know the top item on the stack, use stack top.
$ rtimelog stack top
Stack Maintenance
If you use the stack a great deal, you may find that it begins to grow out of hand. You’ll probably decide that some of the items on the stack are no longer useful and can be discarded. The following commands support manipulation of the stack.
If you want to discard task descriptions from the top of the stack, use the stack drop command.
$ rtimelog stack drop
To discard everything on the stack, use stack clear.
$ rtimelog stack clear
If the most recent task descriptions might still be useful, but the older items could be removed,
you can use the stack keep.
$ rtimelog stack keep