Quick Capture
⌘ K from anywhere opens a capture box that wins even while you are typing somewhere else. One field and Enter by default, with everything else a switch away.
By ToDidIt Product TeamUpdated
Getting a thought out of your head before it costs you anything. The bar for capture has to be lower than the bar for remembering, or you stop capturing and go back to keeping it all in your head.
So the default is deliberately one field and Enter. Everything else a task can carry is present, but folded away until you ask for it.
Tip
⌘ K works while your cursor is in another input, on purpose. A capture box that loses to whatever field you happen to be in is one you stop trusting, which is the same as not having it.
The whole flow is two keystrokes and some typing.
Press ⌘ K.
Open the appIt opens over whatever you were doing, from any screen in the app, mid-sentence in another field included.
Type the task, details and all.
The name field does the work: "Call Alex tomorrow at 3pm p1 #sales +Website" saves as Call Alex with the date, time, priority, tag and project set and lifted out of the name. Whatever it matches shows up in the fields below as you type, so nothing is applied unseen. See natural-language entry.
Leave the project alone unless it is wrong.
It defaults to whichever project you were looking at, so capturing from inside a project does the obvious thing, and to Inbox when you are not in one. Type +Website in the name to file it somewhere else without reaching for the picker. Leave it on Inbox and the task is still yours: it appears everywhere the All filter is on.
Press Enter.
Saves as soon as the name is not empty. Escape closes without saving.
More than the one field suggests. These are always there:
- Name, and a description for context, links or acceptance criteria.
- Project, priority, due date and due time.
- Tags, searched or created inline.
- Assignee, which only appears once a project has two or more members.
Both sit behind switches that are off every time it opens, because a checklist editor and a blocker picker sitting open by default turn a capture box into a form.
Off is a hiding place, though, so each switch says underneath when there is something behind it. Blockers need a project selected before they appear, since dependencies are a project concept.
The + button in the bottom corner opens the same box, which is how most people capture on a phone. Horizon also has its own inline add on each column, which sets the due date to that column's day for you. It takes a name only: no natural-language parsing, and no undo. If exactly one project is filtered in that view the task joins it, otherwise it goes to Inbox.
There is no separate inline add row inside a project any more. It was a less capable copy of this box, with no project picker, no tags and no blockers, sitting permanently at the top of every project, so it went.
Every capture pushes an undo entry, so ⌘ Z takes it straight back out. If the task had subtasks, undo removes the whole group in one go rather than leaving orphans behind.
Similar readings
Everything below is in the Happiness Center.
Natural-language entry
Type "Call Alex tomorrow at 3pm p1 #sales +Website" and the date, time, priority, tag and project are lifted out of the title and set on the task. Free on every plan.
Undo
⌘ Z takes back the last reversible action for about six seconds. A toast offers the same thing with a button, for people who do not think in keyboard shortcuts.
Keyboard shortcuts
Single-key navigation, ⌘ K to capture, ⌘ Z to undo. Press slash for the full cheat sheet, which is always the current list.
The task drawer
Open any task to get its description, subtasks, dependencies, tags, assignee, comments and dates in one panel, without losing your place in the list.
Tags
A shared workspace vocabulary you can put on any task, type while capturing, and filter by anywhere.
Dependencies
Mark a task as blocked by another. Blocked cards carry a padlock in Horizon, and the padlock tells you exactly what is in the way.