til/taskfile/create-interactive-picker-for-set-of-subtasks.md

Create Interactive Picker For Set Of Subtasks

For my TIL repo, I have a Taskfile.yml that defines a set of notes:* tasks for interacting with a NOTES.md file that lives in a private Git submodule.

I wanted to make it easier on myself to not have to remember all the different notes subtasks, so I created a helper task to make it easy to see the options and run one.

A summary of the Taskfile is shown below including the entirety of the notes task. That task will parse a listing of the available tasks (via task --list and some sed commands) and pass those to fzf to provide an interactive picker of the available subtasks.

tasks:
  notes:
    desc: Interactive picker for notes tasks
    cmds:
      - |
        TASK=$(task --list | grep "^\* notes:" | sed 's/^\* notes://' | sed 's/\s\+/ - /' | fzf --prompt="Select notes task: " --height=40% --reverse) || true
        if [ -n "$TASK" ]; then
          TASK_NAME=$(echo "$TASK" | awk '{print $1}' | sed 's/:$//')
          task notes:$TASK_NAME
        fi
    interactive: true
    silent: true

  notes:edit:
    ...

  notes:sync:
    ...

  notes:open:
    ...

  notes:push:
    ...

  notes:status:
    ...

  notes:pull:
    ...

  notes:diff:
    ...

  notes:log:
    ...

Now I can run the notes task to get a summary and interactive picker that looks like the following:

❯ task notes
Select notes task: 
  9/9
> │                    Interactive picker for notes tasks
  diff:                Show uncommitted changes in notes
  edit:                All-in-one edit, commit, and push notes
  log:                 Show recent commit history for notes
  open:                Opens NOTES.md (syncs latest changes first) in default editor
  pull:                Pull latest changes (alias for sync)
  push:                Commit and push changes to notes submodule
  status:              Check status of notes submodule
  sync:                Sync latest changes from the notes submodule

It pulls in the subtask name and description. I can then use fzf's navigation and filtering to narrow down and select the task I want to run.