To-Do List is an infinite product category.

They are extremely personal and any unwanted features end up as friction.

You'll never find a perfect Todo app because it will have an audience of 1 so wouldn't be made.

Other examples of Todo apps:

Things, 2Do, Todoist, OmniFocus, Due, Reminders (Apple), Clear, GoodTask, Notes, Google Keep

The list is literally neverending,

Why does a to-do list have to have any features by default? It could be a blank screen with a "settings" sign in the upper right, where you can enable just the features you need.

If I don't find such a software, I will write it myself. I actually already started:

https://x.com/marekgibney/status/1844077244903571549

I am developing it on the side, while I try to get by with existing solutions.

Not every "feature" is a checkbox. Many features are about how the UI integrates everything and changes over time.

So your "settings" asking the user to design their own app!

That's the developer's job!

What would be an example of a feature that can not be enabled via a checkbox?

Remind me in X number of days.

The setting to use checkboxes.

Which language the settings menu should appear in, for one.

> It could be a blank screen with a "settings" sign in the upper right, where you can enable just the features you need.

That's a "feature" that makes it more annoying for your first time user, which probably puts off a decent proportion of them.

The out-of-the box experience is what most people will use - they will not dive into endless settings and config

(ignoring the insane dev cost of supporting every possible feature combination)

It seems like you're looking for an outliner? Workflowy might fit your needs: https://workflowy.com/

Like others have said, the perfect to-do list is impossible because each person wants wildly different functionality.

My dream to-do list has minimal interaction, with the details handled like I have my own personal secretary. All I'd do is verbally say something like "remind me to do laundry later" and it would do the rest: Categorizing, organizing, prioritizing, scheduling and adding sub-tasks as needed.

I love the idea of automatic sub-tasks created at level which helps with your particular procrastination level. For example "do laundry" would add in "gather clothes, bring to laundry room, separate colors, add to washer, set timer, add to dryer, set timer, get clothes, fold clothes, put away, reschedule in a week (but hide until then). Maybe it's even add in Pomodoro timers to help.

LLMs with reasoning might get us there soon - we've been waiting for Knowledge Navigator like assistants for years.

This is the sort of thing I like trying to make llms do, thanks for the idea. I have a discord bot set up already that sends notifications and accepts notes; I will try adding some endpoints and burning some credits I have to see how hard it is to make AI talk to alarm endpoints in a smart way, etc

I'm one of the creators of Godspeed, which is a fast, 100% keyboard oriented to-do app (though we do support drag and drop as well!). And we've got a web app!

https://godspeedapp.com/

Just tried it, and this is very much the opposite of what I am looking for.

What I would like is a very minimal layout. Basically with nothing on the screen. And I want to be able to organize my world by dragging, dropping, swiping recursive items.

I use Google's Keep but you may need to make your own

I agree that Keep is pretty good. I switched over to Carnet when I setup my nextcloud. It's OK, but not as good as Keep.

Any.do did me well until I adopted a new method of stacking tasks into a routine.

The hard part is altering the routine.

Just tried it. Way too much stuff on the screen for my liking. Plus it seems to be not recursive.

Similar to my thoughts about Trello:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43068867

I find Trello adequate.

One issue I have with Trello is that it has multiple types of items. And that it is not recursive.

When I create an item "Supermarket" and then an item "Bread", I cannot drag and drop the item "Bread" into "Supermarket". But that is how I think. I have a lot of "items" and each item can contain other "items". I don't want any other type of object.

Another problem is that I cannot customize the layout. I can't remove every icon from the items in the list. I only want to see the item names, no other info like the icon that shows that there is a description or anything. But Trello seems to not support that.

I would love to have a To-Do app that is fluid for both one-off tasks and periodic checklists (daily/weekly/monthly/etc.) Most importantly, I want it to yell at me to actually do it. I was pretty surprised that basically nothing seems to fit the bill and even what existing "GTD" type apps could do felt cumbersome and limited.