• contexts: use contexts to categorize your different modes of activity, e.g. "Home", "Work", "Phone", "Errands", etc. context schemes are fairly personal: for some examples, see 43Folder's Merlin on his contexts and this thread collecting people's contexts.

• projects: fairly self-explanatory — anything you have to do that will require more than a couple actions. when you finish, a project can be "completed." a project's actions may span different contexts.

• next actions: the idea here is to be fairly specific about the next action for a project, thus doing your planning in advance. once organized by context and project, you can drill through the actions that need to get done.

• notes: you can add notes to collect your thoughts on a specific project. notes may be formatted in Textile or Markdown.

it's easy! just head over to your feeds page and pick out a TXT feed, which provides a nicely-formatted ASCII list of your todos. you can display this URL from the command line with curl, which is most likely already installed on your Mac or Linux system.

just have curl grab your feed URL like so, replacing this URL with yours here:

curl -m 2 'http://tracks.tra.in/todos.txt?token=9f97d131&due=0'

(the -m 2 indicates curl should spend no longer than 2 seconds overall trying to talk to tracks.tra.in. this is not usually a problem, unless your DNS lookup takes longer than expected.)

so now try adding an alias to quickly display your todos! or you can set your shell up, like mine, to display a "message of the day" with a list of today's actions each time i open a new terminal. just add the command above to the end of your .bash_profile or .cshrc.

(Updated) don't want to wait? tracks.tra.in user and blogger ændrük provides a more extensive shell script that caches your todos for quicker terminal startups.