An XVTDL Page

Unofficial, but the only one we know about

XVTDL is a todo list manager based on the XView toolkit. It has a fairly large set of features for a simple application:
  • You can manage multiple todo lists; lists can have sublists.
  • Each todo list item is prioritized; each list can be displayed in a combination of priority, chronological, and alphabetical order.
  • List items, if you do not "check them off", will propagate from one day to the next.
  • List items can be recurring items, i.e., items that will automatically pop up weekly, biweekly, monthly, etc. These items will propagate like "normal" list items.
  • List items can have deadlines associated with them, with several types of actions that execute on or after a deadline.
  • List items can have annotations associated with them. Annotations are edited with a "normal" text editor.
  • You can set list items on any day, with easy calendar management.
  • Lists can be printed on a "plain" or Postscript printer.
  • Printing/display supports ISO 8859.1 character set.
  • List items can be logged when checked on/off with optional comments added to the log file.
  • List items can be retained or deleted when checked off.
  • Multiple lists can be combined for viewing or printing.
  • Multiple lists from multiple files can be manipulated.
  • Changes to the todo list can be made and are detected by the running programs.

The automatic propagation of unfinished items from one day to the next is particularly appreciated by those of us who tend to procrastinate!

Current version

XVTDL was widely distributed, mostly with SuSE Linux, and might still be as far as I know. The last known official version is 5.2, released in the mid-1990s. Unfortunately it has a number of issues that render it unusable after 1999. Seeing no public effort to fix these, I went ahead and did it myself.

This page is the home of unofficial release 5.2msj, which you may download as source. There are no new features, only changes to deal with Y2K effects:

The patches have been tested only on Sparc Solaris 2.6, but are quite likely to work on any system where release 5.2 can be compiled successfully.

Development plans

None. XVTDL was developed by Mike Jipping, who was at jipping@cs.hope.edu at one time; I sent mail about these patches, but didn't get a response. As far as I'm concerned it's still his code; I have no plans for further development (and no longer have access to a Solaris system).


Mark Jackson
May 8 2010