Should I Build It Should I Build It
25 May 2025
Productivity Developer Tools

A simple todo list app built for developers. Focused on creating and ...

...managing tasks and projects with plain text files and command prompt. Very simple easy to use syntax. Integrations for various code edtiors

Confidence
Engagement
Net use signal
Net buy signal

Idea type: Competitive Terrain

While there's clear interest in your idea, the market is saturated with similar offerings. To succeed, your product needs to stand out by offering something unique that competitors aren't providing. The challenge here isn’t whether there’s demand, but how you can capture attention and keep it.

Should You Build It?

Not before thinking deeply about differentiation.

Your are here

The idea of a simple todo list app for developers using plain text files and command-line interface lands in a crowded space, as indicated by the high number of similar products (n_matches=6). This puts you in a 'Competitive Terrain' where differentiation is key. While there might be interest in such a tool, capturing attention will be challenging. The average engagement (n_comments=7) for similar products is medium, suggesting that people are interested enough to comment and discuss, but the lack of buy and use signals across all similar products warrants a deep dive into understanding unmet needs within your target audience. Essentially, you're entering a space where you'll need to offer something meaningfully different to stand out.

Recommendations

  1. Begin with thorough market research to pinpoint unmet needs within the developer community for task management. What frustrations do developers face with existing tools? Identify pain points related to simplicity, integration with workflows, or specific features that are currently lacking. The criticism summary from competing products highlights issues such as lacking mobile features, usability flaws, and limitations in functionality, so this is a great place to start.
  2. Focus on a specific niche of developers. Are you targeting web developers, game developers, or a particular language ecosystem? Tailoring your app to a specific niche will allow you to deeply understand their needs and create a highly relevant product, increasing the likelihood of adoption within that focused group.
  3. Develop a unique value proposition that clearly differentiates your app from existing solutions. This could be a focus on extreme simplicity, enhanced privacy, seamless integration with specific code editors, or innovative command-line workflows. Highlight what makes your app uniquely suited to solve developers' problems.
  4. Given the emphasis on command-line interaction, ensure your app offers a superior user experience in the terminal. Prioritize keyboard-driven navigation, clear visual cues, and intuitive commands. Consider advanced features like autocompletion, syntax highlighting, and customizable themes to enhance productivity.
  5. Start with a minimal viable product (MVP) that focuses on the core features and get it in the hands of a small group of target users. Gather feedback through surveys, interviews, and direct observation of their workflows. Iterate rapidly based on this feedback to refine your app and ensure it meets their needs.
  6. Prioritize building a strong community around your app. Create a forum, blog, or social media presence where users can share feedback, ask questions, and contribute to the app's development. This community will serve as a valuable source of insights and a powerful marketing channel.
  7. Explore integrations with popular code editors like VS Code, Sublime Text, and Atom. These integrations could allow developers to create, manage, and track tasks directly from their coding environment, streamlining their workflow and increasing adoption of your app.
  8. Consider a freemium business model, offering a basic version of the app for free and charging for premium features like advanced integrations, collaboration tools, or increased storage. This allows you to attract a wider audience while generating revenue from power users.

Questions

  1. Given the existing competition, what specific problem are you uniquely solving for developers that current todo list apps aren't addressing effectively?
  2. How will you ensure that your plain text file-based approach doesn't become a limitation in terms of scalability or collaboration as users' projects grow in complexity?
  3. What concrete steps will you take to build a thriving community around your app and ensure that you're continuously gathering and incorporating user feedback into your development process?

Your are here

The idea of a simple todo list app for developers using plain text files and command-line interface lands in a crowded space, as indicated by the high number of similar products (n_matches=6). This puts you in a 'Competitive Terrain' where differentiation is key. While there might be interest in such a tool, capturing attention will be challenging. The average engagement (n_comments=7) for similar products is medium, suggesting that people are interested enough to comment and discuss, but the lack of buy and use signals across all similar products warrants a deep dive into understanding unmet needs within your target audience. Essentially, you're entering a space where you'll need to offer something meaningfully different to stand out.

Recommendations

  1. Begin with thorough market research to pinpoint unmet needs within the developer community for task management. What frustrations do developers face with existing tools? Identify pain points related to simplicity, integration with workflows, or specific features that are currently lacking. The criticism summary from competing products highlights issues such as lacking mobile features, usability flaws, and limitations in functionality, so this is a great place to start.
  2. Focus on a specific niche of developers. Are you targeting web developers, game developers, or a particular language ecosystem? Tailoring your app to a specific niche will allow you to deeply understand their needs and create a highly relevant product, increasing the likelihood of adoption within that focused group.
  3. Develop a unique value proposition that clearly differentiates your app from existing solutions. This could be a focus on extreme simplicity, enhanced privacy, seamless integration with specific code editors, or innovative command-line workflows. Highlight what makes your app uniquely suited to solve developers' problems.
  4. Given the emphasis on command-line interaction, ensure your app offers a superior user experience in the terminal. Prioritize keyboard-driven navigation, clear visual cues, and intuitive commands. Consider advanced features like autocompletion, syntax highlighting, and customizable themes to enhance productivity.
  5. Start with a minimal viable product (MVP) that focuses on the core features and get it in the hands of a small group of target users. Gather feedback through surveys, interviews, and direct observation of their workflows. Iterate rapidly based on this feedback to refine your app and ensure it meets their needs.
  6. Prioritize building a strong community around your app. Create a forum, blog, or social media presence where users can share feedback, ask questions, and contribute to the app's development. This community will serve as a valuable source of insights and a powerful marketing channel.
  7. Explore integrations with popular code editors like VS Code, Sublime Text, and Atom. These integrations could allow developers to create, manage, and track tasks directly from their coding environment, streamlining their workflow and increasing adoption of your app.
  8. Consider a freemium business model, offering a basic version of the app for free and charging for premium features like advanced integrations, collaboration tools, or increased storage. This allows you to attract a wider audience while generating revenue from power users.

Questions

  1. Given the existing competition, what specific problem are you uniquely solving for developers that current todo list apps aren't addressing effectively?
  2. How will you ensure that your plain text file-based approach doesn't become a limitation in terms of scalability or collaboration as users' projects grow in complexity?
  3. What concrete steps will you take to build a thriving community around your app and ensure that you're continuously gathering and incorporating user feedback into your development process?

  • Confidence: High
    • Number of similar products: 6
  • Engagement: Medium
    • Average number of comments: 7
  • Net use signal: 14.2%
    • Positive use signal: 21.3%
    • Negative use signal: 7.1%
  • Net buy signal: 3.6%
    • Positive buy signal: 5.3%
    • Negative buy signal: 1.8%

This chart summarizes all the similar products we found for your idea in a single plot.

The x-axis represents the overall feedback each product received. This is calculated from the net use and buy signals that were expressed in the comments. The maximum is +1, which means all comments (across all similar products) were positive, expressed a willingness to use & buy said product. The minimum is -1 and it means the exact opposite.

The y-axis captures the strength of the signal, i.e. how many people commented and how does this rank against other products in this category. The maximum is +1, which means these products were the most liked, upvoted and talked about launches recently. The minimum is 0, meaning zero engagement or feedback was received.

The sizes of the product dots are determined by the relevance to your idea, where 10 is the maximum.

Your idea is the big blueish dot, which should lie somewhere in the polygon defined by these products. It can be off-center because we use custom weighting to summarize these metrics.

Similar products

Relevance

My Command Line Todo List

16 Aug 2024 Developer Tools

I recently published a comment about my todo list here on HN and a few people asked about it. I decided to do a quick write-up of the simple commands I put together to accomplish this in the shell (zsh in my case but it likely works in bash too).

Started with plaintext task management, needed multi-platform sync.

Single line per task was not enough.

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Simple TODO app that runs in the terminal

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Hey there, HN!I wrote a simple TODO app that runs in the terminal. The GIF demo in the repo (https://github.com/mathspp/textual-todo) uses the mouse so that people watching can see where I am clicking, but everything can be done from the comfort of your keyboard.Basic features include data persistence (doh!), sorting items by due date, different styling for items that are late, and collapsing details for a more compact view.Let me know if you find any bugs and/or if you have suggestions for simple features that I could add to keep this app lightweight but useful!

Simple TODO app for terminal with keyboard support.

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Sublime Todo - Minimalist, text editor-based task management for macOS

27 Dec 2024 Mac Productivity Task Management

A keyboard-driven, distraction-free todo app for macOS. Inspired by Sublime Text's efficiency, featuring project tags, smart organization, and fast native macOS build.

Sublime To Do is praised for its simplicity, efficiency, and keyboard-driven approach, making it a productive tool for managing tasks. Users appreciate its clean, minimalistic, and straightforward design, with some likening it to qBasic. A suggestion was made to avoid adding new tasks at the bottom of the list to prevent user confusion, while others are interested in a terminal implementation.

Users criticize the task list's UX, suggesting new tasks should appear at the top. They also find the project tag display insufficient, requesting autocomplete functionality. Additionally, the app's behavior of opening two views of the same content, one smaller, is considered a usability flaw.

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I Made a Todo List for Developer Power Users [video]

09 Feb 2023 Developer Tools

Hey HN,I've been working on Todool for a year trying to make an editor that fits my development workflow.a) Fast text-editing without needing to touch the mouseb) Multi-Selection to perform commands on more than a single linec) Switching between List/Kanban modeYou can try the free demo at itch.io for (Windows/Linux) https://skytrias.itch.io/todool#demo

-Missing mobile features. - Demo was very irritating. - Similar to Workflowy. - Frequent crashes when expanding/contracting nodes. - Needs more interactive features and full text entries. - Low contrast affects accessibility. - Interface text tiny and hard to read. - Concerns about data privacy. - Experience with tasks is difficult to get. - Limited to Mac/iOS users. - No criticism. - Lacks mobile app, multi-user, and task sharing. - Needs more mainstream tooling improvements. - Doubt many solo devs use JIRA. - Reinventing existing tool - Games are a subset of software. - Limited to 60% of Org-mode's functions. - Slow improvement. - Unpolished but functional tool. - Stop working when needing notes on tasks. - Checkvist page more efficient for product overview. - Lacks unique features, less attractive. - Unfair comparison to established tool. - Unclear benefits of new tool. - Workflowy is online, not suitable for company information. - No one has asked it yet. - Show HN videos monetization issue.

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