Views

In Quest there are two types of commands: global commands (e.g. open and init) and view commands (e.g. set and edit). View commands run in the context of a view and global commands do not. The purpose of a view is to make it more convenient to work with subsets of your todo.txt by defining a query, sort order and other options that apply to all view commands that run in the context of the view.

For example you might want to consider items with the @inbox context as inbox items.

In that case to list all the inbox items you can run:

quest -q '!done && @inbox'

Note that by default the output will also show a contexts column, which is irrelevant to us, because we already know that the items have the @inbox context. We can therefore specify the projection manually:

quest -q '!done && @inbox' -p "line,creation,description"

Slowly this is becoming infeasible to write everytime to list your inbox. By defining a view we can make it more convenient:

[views.inbox]
query = '!done && @inbox'
projection = ["line","creation","description"]

With this in your configuration we can now just write quest inbox to show the inbox. Not only that, but we can also use every view command on the subset defined by this view. A few examples:

# Opens your inbox items in your editor. 
# This is very convenient to review inbox items 
quest inbox edit 
# Removes the inbox context from all items in your inbox
quest inbox unset @inbox 
# Prioritizes all inbox items as A
quest inbox prio A

As you might have guest the general command structure is quest [view] [view-command]. If the view is omitted the view specified by the [default-view] section applies.

Although it does not run any queries the add command is also a view command. This is because you can define an add-prefix and add-suffix in a view. This is useful, because when running quest inbox add foo you would expect "foo" to actually show up in your inbox, but it does not, because it does not have the appropriate contexts. With add-suffix your can fix this (within limitations) by defining a string that is appended to every item added through the view. By setting this to @inbox you create the illusion of actually adding to the inbox.

To read about all the available view options checkout the config reference.