Adding a todo

Press N anywhere, or click New todo, and type the whole thing on one line:

Clean the gutters tomorrow at 3pm #chores p1

That creates "Clean the gutters", due tomorrow at 3pm, in Chores, at high priority. Press Enter and it's filed.

You don't have to use any of it. Buy milk is a perfectly good todo, and nothing in the line is required except the words themselves.

What it recognises

You type	What it does	Examples
ordinary words	the todo's title	Clean the gutters
a date, in plain English	the due date, and a time if you give one	tomorrow, friday, next tuesday, in 3 days, 25 Aug, 3pm, tomorrow at 3pm
#name	the list	#chores
p1 p2 p3	priority — high, medium, low	p1

Whatever is left after those are taken out becomes the title. The parts it recognised are highlighted as you type, and shown as pills underneath, so you can see what it understood before pressing Enter.

The pills are clickable. If it read the wrong date, or you want a different list, change it there — the pill rewrites the line for you.

The first one wins

If you name the same thing twice, the first is used and the rest are left alone as ordinary text:

You type	Title	List
Buy milk #Chores #Work	Buy milk #Work	Chores

A todo belongs to one list, has one due date and one priority, so there is nothing sensible for a second #name to mean. Rather than guessing — or silently dropping it — Fold treats it as part of what you wrote. The same goes for p1 p3 (high, with "p3" in the title) and for two dates: Ship it tomorrow friday is due tomorrow, and is called "Ship it friday".

You can always tell which one counted: only the token that was used is highlighted. If a word isn't highlighted, it's staying in the title.

When it leaves things alone

It would rather miss a date than invent one, so ordinary writing survives:

• Read chapter 3 — a todo called "Read chapter 3", no due date.
• Fix issue #12 — #12 isn't one of your lists, so it stays in the title.
• Update the v2 spec — no date.

It also won't set a due date of right now, since a todo that's overdue the moment you make it isn't useful.

p4 is just text. Some apps use it for "no priority", but that's already what you get by not saying anything, so Fold leaves it in the title rather than highlighting a word that changes nothing.

Notes

The line is for the todo, not for prose. If you want to write more, use + Notes underneath the field — Shift+Enter makes a new line in there, while Enter still files the todo.

Lists that don't use dates

A recognised list like Reading has no due dates at all. On those, dates aren't read from your line — so Finish Dune next Friday keeps every one of those words in the title, and the date pill says why it's unavailable. Set a priority instead to say what's next.