Show HN: Godspeed is a fast, 100% keyboard oriented todo app for Mac

$150 is $90 more than getting Things for iOS and macOS. I'm a big Things user, will be curious to see if this is worth the price.

Shame that it only nets you 18 months, and seemingly no support guarantee. I'm also curious how limitless bug fixes for older versions is going to work out. "Godspeed will never stop working" feels like a bold claim to make given enough time in "never." I've been using Things for 6 years now.

I'm surprised no one in this thread has mentioned Workflowy[0].

It is extremely minimal and elegant, does everything that you're looking for (on first glance), and is completely free. Not to be hyperbolic but the interface is ingenious in it's power and simplicity. Give it a shot.

[0]: https://workflowy.com/basics/

Do you have Things for Mac? I loved Things on my iPhone until I saw the Mac version is another CAD 70.

Now I use vanilla Obsidian with checkboxes - super simple, and I own the file.

There's no snoozing though - you have to cut-paste a task into a different todo list if you want to move it.

I'm sure there's also a plugin that would make it more org-mode-ish.

Somewhat off topic, does anyone use Paper/Pencil (specifically bullet journals), Apps and Digital Calendars with what feels like not much effort? I haven't been able to come to a happy medium between them all.

Also Concern #3, is there a subscription for things? o.O

I'm happy to say it looks like we tick 9/10 of those boxes!

10. Focus mode

You're right, this is the one we don't support. But we've gotten requests for it, including from my cofounder, so its coming!

1. How painful will it be to import from Things?

I'm not sure if Things lets you export tasks, but if they do I'm more than happy to run a one-time custom import for you (or any other Things user). There's also the simpler way, which is copying a bunch of tasks to your clipboard and hitting ⌘+Shift+V in Godspeed to paste tasks from clipboard. It'll respect indentation and bullet characters.

2. What if the app goes away? I don't want to lose my stuff or switch again, it's a pain. How big is your company? Are you a going concern with real customers or is this a side project that will fall by the wayside?

Important question, thank you for asking it. First, if the app goes away, you're able to export your data from Godspeed. Currently it exports as JSON, but we're going to add other export formats in the future (as well as attachment exporting, which we don't currently support - though all your attachments are stored in a particular folder in ~/Library).

We're small right now, just a few people. But this app is pretty cheap to run and we use it every day (I don't want to brag, but I'm currently at the top of the charts for # of todos with 22,000 :p). So for what its worth, we intend to be around for a long time.

Thanks so much for the feedback and for checking it out! Happy to answer more questions, either here or daniel@godspeedapp.com

I am (personally) alright with this model. $150 is on par with OmniFocus Pro [0] which I've gotten easily more than $150 of value out of. (Including prior purchases of earlier versions, and similar price points.)

With todo apps, I don't really expect the same sort of constant on-slaught of features like I do from other things. I expect it to continue to work and get out of the way. I expect the price to reflect the fact there was a lot of upfront work to get it "done" to a level where I can just use it.

[0] https://www.omnigroup.com/omnifocus/buy/

Pay no mind to this guy/gal. S/he's not your ideal customer.

$150 once for an app to organize your work and personal life is a screaming bargain.

$150 for an electron app. I was considering holding my nose about the Electron part as I've been desperately trying to find a todo app that meets my needs, but damned if I'm going to subscribe or pay $150 for one.

Right like an editor and text is mouse free too and I can grep it with regex or sync it anywhere and have it on any device too.

With no guarantee about future pricing models

And that's not even a perpetual license with updates.

Ok but are we overlooking the $150 for a todo app? There are entire suites of software that cost less than $150 to own. Microsoft Office Home, Windows 11, Photoshop Elements 2024, Premiere Elements 2024...

I'm just saying I think the buy to own price is an order of magnitude too high relative to other significantly more complicated pieces of software.

Yeah $110AUD/year is more than twice what I'd expect to pay.

OP could offer the same thing as JetBrains does : for X months of continuous subscription (here 18), you get a lifetime license for the current version. It satisfies both the customers who wants one time purchase but as a developper you still get your ARR.

As someone who has used every TODO method under the sun over the last 20 years and talked to other people on their own work tracking journeys, I think task management to be a deeply personal thing that has to map to how you think and do things for it to stick.

Pen and paper worked great for me when I did everything at a desk (or carried a notebook with me) and I was always doing deep focus work. I went digital when I started being more mobile in my work and I had a lot of contexts where I needed to jot quick TODOs as I thought of them. Also, it's difficult to collaborate with my wife using paper.

The inbox mechanic for tasks works great, because I don't need to add all my task metadata right away. I can also annotate projects and contexts so I can say "what are my TODOs when I'm at home" or "what are my TODOs related to a person on my team". Now that I'm tracking over 20 things, it's necessary to stay organized

"Hi siri, remind mind to do AB CD EF"

Yes, it'd take me several minutes to track down a pen and paper.

I mean… Yeah? Most likely?

I wonder if one human lifetime is enough to count all the TODO apps.

Strongly in the pen and paper camp, myself.

How do I script it?

We don't have a story for this yet, but we will. And I strongly agree about JavaScript. In fact, an idea I really like is making that API available directly in the developer console, which we have available anyway because we're an Electron app!

I won't use a to-do app without a start date.

We've gotten this request before and its on our list! I also really liked this feature of OmniFocus.

I can't deep link directly to an item

This is coming soon too, I find myself wanting it all the time.

I can't legally use it without end-to-end encryption.

Totally understandable. Once again, this is on our list, and has been hotly requested.

I SUPER appreciate this feedback. Always valuable to hear about the blockers, and you can bet I'll follow up with you when we've addressed them all!

How do I script it? OF's automation is a must-have, as that's how I integrate it with my other apps. Extensive Shortcuts support (ala Things) is a minimum. AppleScript or JavaScript is better.

What's the usecase for scripting in todo apps? Are you using it like some kind of "cron job"?

Without meaning disrespect towards your particular workflow (in fact - much respect), I personally view automation support as a pretty low priority for a new app's roadmap. AppleScript support arrived in Things in 1.1, for instance.

We use a proprietary sync engine, so there isn't some known file format you can edit. I totally understand your objection to this!

We do, however, store the data locally in a sqlite database (~/Library/Godspeed/godspeed-db.sqlite). You shouldn't directly edit it or things won't sync properly, but you can use it to easily read your tasks if you'd like!

I'm curious as well – if there was a SQLite file somewhere that I could read from to hook up e.g. an Alfred plugin or whatever, that would be valuable.

Boy would I love an task manager to respect the fact that work happens in other tools, and provide a centralized layer on top of the tools I integrate with.

My local, private todo list serves a different purpose to Jira. Keeping the two in sync is manual but not difficult.

Every morning I have a routine of selecting my tasks from Jira. During the day, I just try to keep Jira up-to-date. And then at the end of the day, I ensure Jira is up-to-date with my progress.

I've tried multiple times to automate them, but the automation ends up with more costs than benefits.

It's definitely more popular on MacOS than elsewhere.

I've seen this a handful of times with libraries and other software. Typically, it's a year of updates, so 18 months is on the more generous side of things with this model.

I wonder what kind of pain is involved with maintaining every new feature release with bug and compatibility fixes forever*.

It's increasingly common. This particular one is a bit of a headscratcher since typically pay-once-for-an-update period is presented as a de facto subscription, but this also has a subscription.

In this case, you'd pay $150 for an 18-month window of updates, or $144 for two years of updates (or, if you like, $72*1.5 for the same 18-month window, assuming you're going to pay another $150 at month 19 for something interesting.)

Contrast that with Agenda, which is $35 to buy with 12 month of updates, or about $100 for a life-time of updates. The tradeoff is more straightforward as you're just deciding whether to bet on more than three years of features.

Or contrast with OmniFocus which is $150 for the major version, which typically is on a 4-5 year cicle, or $5/mo. In that case you're just betting that you'll use the current major version more than 2.5 years.

(I'm ignoring cashflow discount; you get the idea.)

(The app itself is fun and fast to use, and I'm not complaining or demanding special treatment. I'm just interested in how these things are priced.)

Wouldn't a "month" risk being many days off the intended target date, since it's a non-fixed timespan? E.g. how many days is "1 month from today" (March 20)? You mention medicine, so I assume there's something obvious I'm missing (then again, perhaps the constantly shifting dates for health care appointments where I live say otherwise ;D).

Our date picker already supports similar queries: 60m, 1d, 2w, 12mon. You can even combine them, like `2w+3d`.

(I skipped n-10 because it doesn't support picking dates in the past.)

Thanks for sharing, it's interesting to learn about the medical shorthand regardless :)

same! We're pretty rare.

Android, Windows, and a web version are on the roadmap! If you'd like, you can drop your email address at the bottom of the page and we'll let you know when they're available. (We won't spam you with small product updates / marketing, just the major updates like a new platform.)

Couldn't reminder apps implement "nagging" such that dismissed notifications are re-notified until some action is taken?

Agreed, this is Apple taking advantage of private APIs in much the same way that got Microsoft in so much hot water in the late 90s/early 00s.

I too had this problem so I developed an app that integrates Reminders and Obsidian to solve it; I create all my notes & tasks in Obsidian and my app syncs them to Reminders.app so you get the best of both worlds :)

HN submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39764919

It’s quite similar to Omnifocus’ pricing FWIW

I know people really seem to love natural language task creation, but I almost always found it lacking. The date picker Things has, and Godspeed promotes, works much better for me.

Try Workflowy, it has good native and web apps and a great minimal but powerful design and is completely free.

https://workflowy.com/basics/

Thank you! Windows is on our roadmap, if you'd like you can drop your email address at the bottom of the page and we'll let you know when it's available. (We won't spam you with small product updates / marketing, just major updates like support for a new platform.)

I remember Projectpad being really close to what I wanted in this regard: https://github.com/emmanueltouzery/projectpad2/

Shame it appears to be abandoned.

u/lifeisstillgood look into "Building a Second Brain" and Tiago's PARA method, could help?

I have no problem with a brain dump :)

Really appreciate the kind words! Indeed, actually launching is hard. Like everyone, I've got a big pile of abandoned side projects sitting in a folder somewhere.

I think we're pretty aligned on staying organized. For me, the most important bit is "capture". I need to be able to get tasks out of my head and into a task tracker from as many places as possible. Then later I can triage them.

Godspeed attempts to help with this by offering a global hotkey for quick entry, and an iOS app with Siri and shortcuts support. We also intend to add "log a task by email" soon.

I feel like Omnifocus has good keyboard support, particularly enjoy quick entry support. Looks like Godspeed lack iOS and watch support which makes it a complete non-starter for me.

There is a simple text-based import! If you copy a list of tasks with some kind of leading bullet character, like a `-`, and then hit ⌘+Shift+V in Godspeed, Godspeed will create tasks from the text on your clipboard. It'll even respect indentation and strip off the bullet characters.

I'm also happy to do a custom, one-off import if you can get me any kind of machine readable file.

The "old skool" was pay once, get (usually) 0 updates and then pay again for a new major version. The keep it but stop getting updates model is better than that, usually.

The difference is that with the one-time payment you get to keep the version you have forever, including bug fixes, compatibility updates, and cloud sync, which are all ongoing costs for us.

With the subscription, you lose access when you stop paying.

So I think it is pretty comparable to an old school one-time payment, but with bug fixes and compatibility updates added on top.

The big selling-point is responsive UI, but I feel that should be the minimum we expect from software.

Agreed! That's a big part of what motivated us to build Godspeed.

Perhaps some testimonials from organisations/teams that have used it would be a better thing to lead with than a strange technical statement which most users won't understand. I'm a fairly technical sort of guy myself and I don't exactly know off the top of my head what 50ms latency feels like or how it compares to other note taking software.

Appreciate that feedback! Today is our 1.0 launch, we'll definitely add some testimonials in the coming weeks.

For what it's worth, a response time of 100ms is perceived as instantaneous [0].

[0] https://www.pubnub.com/blog/how-fast-is-realtime-human-perce...

Have you looked at https://www.taskpaper.com/?

I'm the OP, but I was an org-mode user for years. It's exactly what you're describing, and it's available in more than just Emacs these days!

Unfortunately not. I can understand if that's a dealbreaker for you.

There are a few reasons we're not using iCloud: 1. We eventually intend to support other platforms, like Windows and the web. 2. Though they're admittedly rare, we've heard some iCloud horror stories. @DanielDe (OP) lost some files using iCloud Drive, so it's hard for us to trust it. 3. We wanted much tighter control over syncing to provide the particular experience we were aiming for. Things like live cursors for shared lists, and the way our offline experience works, are tightly tied into our sync engine.

What gives, I am not allowed to create a todo for Today or This Evening when it is already late in the day? That does not make a lot of sense to me.

You might be underestimating cross OS keyboard handling difficulties across keyboard layouts….

Remember the Milk is still around and one of the best pieces of software I've ever used! Plus - it's not Mac-exclusive.

I never used Remember the Milk but FWIW you can assign numbered keyboard shortcuts for labels and make smart lists with those labels, so I think you could recreate that flow with Godspeed!

SUPER helpful, thank you! Honestly, I was pretty torn about the music choice, so it's good to hear this feedback. Will definitely consider a change in the future.

And good to know I sound "sincere". That'd be at the top of my list for how I'd like to come off!

No, there's no explicit task dependency right now.

However, there are a couple options you could use: 1. Use nested tasks for this purpose. If task B is nested beneath task A, then B is a dependency of A. Godspeed supports infinite nesting (okay, okay - MAX_INT levels of nesting) 2. You could use labels and smart lists. Give blocked tasks a "Blocked" label and create a smart list that filters out any tasks that are blocked.

I actually used to be an org-mode user, so I strongly agree with this sentiment!

But I really wanted more native features like shared lists, attachments, and a mobile app, which is why I built Godspeed. But Godspeed is heavily influenced by Emacs in a bunch of ways.

This is a common feature request and we'll be adding it as an option soon!

Glad you're liking the feel! What we're going for is essentially an app that "feels" great.

Yes! Super important feature that I'm realizing we never mention on the website, I'll have to add it. Thanks for bringing that to our attention :)

Given that Things, Todoist, TickTick, and probably most(?) others don't support e2ee, I'd not consider it table stakes. If anything it could be a positive differentiator if they did add it, since folks in the forums for other apps often bemoan the lack of e2ee.

It's electron based.

This comment makes _me_ happy! I've noted the request - I like it!

Not OP but it's an Electron app.

This could be good, however it would need an amazing panel UI to do GUI management - text only isn't quite enough IMO.

I tried hard to make task management in Obsidian a thing, and gave up, it just isn't good at it. Tasks, Checklists, all way too clumsy to rely on every day, at least for me

The hotkeys are editable, so it wouldn't make sense to have a static PDF somewhere, but I could certainly add an export of all hotkeys for you to reference! I've written that idea down.

The mobile app is linked on the page: https://godspeedapp.com/ios

You can share lists, and you'll see each other's live cursors like in Google Docs. Is that what you meant? I could be misunderstanding what "shared workspaces" means here.

Ah you can actually dismiss the onboarding panel from the command palette, sorry that wasn't more obvious!

The sidebars can be collapsed with ⌘+; and ⌘+', though we also intend to make them fully resizable soon too!

You're right about the undo/redo stack, we need to improve its integration with the system so those work properly.

Thanks so much for this feedback! Keep it coming!

We had some back and forth around getting the in-app purchase screen to meet Apple's requirements, but I'd say nothing out of the ordinary.

I'm glad you asked about this, because snoozing recurring tasks is one of the 2 big reasons I wanted to create Godspeed in the first place (the other was the date picker). The way this worked in OmniFocus was _infuriating_ to me.

When you snooze a recurring task in Godspeed you use the same date picker as for setting a date, so you have full power and flexibility to choose whatever date/time you'd like. And it only snoozes _this instance_ of the task, without changing future recurring due dates.

Thanks so much! Yes, we're hoping to bring it to Windows, Linux, and web soon, and Android a bit later after that.

The sync engine is proprietary, so you can't use your own provider. We wanted very tight control over syncing to achieve our goals with speed and shared lists. I totally understand your concern, though.

For what its worth, all of your data is stored locally in a sqlite DB. You shouldn't edit this DB or syncing may not work, but you should feel free to read from it if you'd like ~/Library/Godspeed/godspeed-db.sqlite

Thanks! Windows, Android, and a web version are on the roadmap. If you'd like, you can drop your email address at the bottom of the page and we'll let you know when they're available. (We won't spam you with small product updates / marketing, just major updates like support for a new platform.)

We already have CalDAV, but few implement it. I prefer using a caldav server (e.g. email host) because if you have a life in task items, and your software is proprietary and they don't care about import/export - it sucks. 2Do or OmniFocus, not seen anything better yet. I tried for ages to make tasks work in Obsidian, all the plugins, dataview setup - it just felt clumsy and kludgey to work with, so I gave up and let obsidian do what its good at, notes and templates