techfoolery Obey my dog

Test Driven Developemnt and GTD both employ To Do lists to keep track of tasks. I've been a big fan of these task lists, but I've found that I have way too many items on my list to keep them organized. These days I prefer to keep my development-related todo items in the comments of the source code. This allows me to associate the todo item with a specific place in the code, while adding additional documentation to the project. I use a couple of different markers to denote different types of todo items, all based on the C-style single line comment, //:

//! Check this line later on.
//x Delete this line later; only needed during development.
//+ To Do item; an unfinished task.
//- Refactor this line later on.

It's become almost second nature to type //! after a line I think might need some attention, or //x after a line that needs to be removed before going to production. You can do a search for these specific comments to immediately find all lines that need to be reviewed. //- especially has made my life easier; we all know that "Premature optimization is the root of all evil", but I've always been hesitant to leave optimization until later, fearing that I would forget to do it. Now I just mark the line with the comment and forget it, knowing that I'll come back to it later.

The one tool that really makes these comments useful is the TODO bundle in TextMate. After modifying the bundle a bit to search for my comments, I can now type ⌃⇧T to get a complete list of all of these todo items, with links to the exact lines where they appear. Here is how I modified the "Show TODO List" command:

You can change the bundle to search for any specific string, such as //todo or //fixme, so you don't have to change your current practice to take advantage of this. This is just another reason why I am completely hooked on TextMate.