Tasky: A CLI Google Tasks Client in Python

Jun 1, 2011 · 4 minute read

google tasks Python programming

I’ve been looking for a nice and fast Google Tasks client for a long time. There do exist a lot of them but none that I have encountered matched what I was looking for in terms of functionality and ease of use. Given that I have a bit of free time this summer, I decided to write one myself.

This task would have been really hard and clunky a month ago. Luckily, Google introduced the Tasks API about three weeks ago, a hugely requested feature. I hadn’t worked with Google APIs before so I took it up as a challenge to figure out how it all works and put together my client in a few days’ time. I also decided to go with Python this time, as I’d like to get more practice with the language (which I this is really amazing, by the way). The result of the past three days is a very simple and fast client for Google Tasks that works in the command line.

Goals

First, I had to define what I wanted to accomplish with this project. I wanted a way to retrieve tasks from one or more task lists (I currently have one but have used multiple in the past), have a way to quickly add, remove, and check/uncheck tasks. I wanted the whole thing to work in the terminal, as that’s where I spend most of my time working. And I wanted the commands to be as short as possible, as to minimize the amount of typing necessary. Specifically, I did not want to have to type an entire task’s name in order to perform some action on it. And I wanted the whole thing to take as little time as possible between subsequent operations - I didn’t mind a possibly slow shutdown if I could have fast removes and adds and toggles while the application was open. Finally, I wanted to have two modes: Normal Mode and Quick Mode. In Normal Mode, the application is opened and kept running, allowing me to make a series of changes to it before closing. In Quick Mode, I perform a single operation fully specified as arguments in the command line. The changes are made (with ambiguities resolved when necessary) and the application closed immediately. And I wanted to have it do authentication in order to access account information from any computer I choose to run the application on.

Implementation

I was able to accomplish all of these goals by loading all task lists into memory upon startup and committing all changes to the server when closing the application. The Tasks API is still in Labs, which means it could change from the time of this writing, but as of right now, retrieving everything requires $N+1$ API calls, where $N$ is the number of task lists in a given account. So that was fairly quick. I used Google’s sample code almost verbatim for OAuth 2.0 authentication (yay security!) and that’s usually the slowest part of the application. It does cache credentials, but still takes a bit of time to establish a secure connection. Once all the data is retrieved, I decided to store it in memory as a dict of dict of lists of task objects - which are just dicts themselves. That’s a lot of dictionaries, but it made sense since I was able to get to fast accesses, insertions, and deletions. As part of the way I implemented the code, the dictionary of tasks had to be an OrderedDict; if you look at the code, it’ll make sense why. I then performed changes on the in-memory task lists as the user made changes, but those changes were only reflected via flag statuses and not actually performed. Then, when the application is closed, I sent back just the changes, minimizing the number of total API calls.

Conclusion

The result is a little application that I’m fairly proud of. It does what I need it to do and I actually do use it. There’s currently no documentation beyond what’s in the source code and the code is still a bit rough around the edges. The link to my repository is here. As mentioned on that page, this application requires Python >=2.7, Google API client for Python, and the Fabulous library (used for having bold and strike-through text in the terminal). I have not included the Client ID, Client Secret, or Developer Key values in this code, but you can get those values by registering this application for yourself via the Google API Console. The code itself is fully open-source and you are free to use or modify it as you wish. It’s still in development, so look out for changes in the future.