Manually ordering tasks?

[jg10-mastodon-social]

Apologies if I missed it - is there a way to manually reorder tasks?
Thanks!

I often use manual ordering of tasks to group them in ad-hoc ways, prioritise them, put them in the order I want to complete them, just make the order make sense to me, or all of these things at the same time.

My task lists are usually on the order of 10-20 items actively being considered within a list of 50-600 items, so it's useful to be able to move several items at once, and common to need to move the same item multiple times.

[NoelDeMartin]

Hey, thanks for opening an issue!

You're right that this feature is missing. The way I order my tasks is by setting due dates or setting them as important, the current sorting order is first by importance, then by due date, and then by creation date. But if you need sorting beyond that, it's not supported yet.

But I'm a bit hesitant to implement this for a couple of reasons.

First of all, drag & drop is a bit funky and I'm not sure I could implement it properly 😅. I guess I could use a library or something, but I implemented it in Umai (to reorder instructions) and it doesn't work super well.

And the second reason, is that I'm not sure how to model this, specially in a Solid application where the data could be modified elsewhere. If I decide to give it a number for the "order", should I set it to tasks length+1 when creating a new task? What if other apps don't do it? And how would I recompute it after sorting, would I need to update all the tasks below to decrease the number? Or adding decimals? Also, what happens with the current sorting criteria. If someone tries to drag a normal task on top of an important one, should I allow them to do it? etc.

In short, I'm not against the idea, but personally I don't need it and I have a lot of doubts on how to implement this. Maybe I could investigate how other apps do it, but I'm still hesitant to spend time on this. I'm keeping this issue open in case someone has some further suggestions or comments, but for now I don't think I'll work on it.

[NoelDeMartin]

By the way, I forgot to mention that the importance of a task is actually modeled as a number already. So technically, you can set different levels of importance and they should be sorted. But the UI only offers a toggle to set/unset them to 1. Maybe I'd be open to supporting different levels of importance (high priority, low priority, etc.). But I worry that this complicates too much the UI, so I'm also hesitant about it. Of course, you can implement a separate app to sort the tasks yourself using the importance if you want xD. It uses the ical:priority property.

[jg10-mastodon-social]

Thanks for the explanation! I'll see whether I can use the dates and importance to achieve what I'm after - or whether I find an alternative solution that Focus could consider.
I agree drag and drop can be funky, particularly on mobile - it's the reason I was looking for an alternative to my own funky custom app :-D