[x]it! Syntax Guide

A checkbox can have one of five statuses: open, checked, ongoing, obsolete, in-question.

Any other character for the status is invalid.

It’s also invalid if the status character is missing, or if it contains extra characters.

The checkbox cannot be preceded by whitespace.

The checkbox can be followed by a description, which is separated by one space from the checkbox.

Additional spaces can appear, which then belong to the description copy.

The description can be absent, or all spaces.

The space separator is mandatory.

The description can be continued on the next line, with increased indentation. Indentation is 4 spaces.

When the description styling is specific to the status, the styling should apply to all subsequent lines likewise.

There may be additional spaces after the indentation, which then belong to the description copy.

Indentation cannot be anything else than 4 spaces.

Square brackets in the description (even at the beginning of subsequent lines) are not recognised as checkboxes.

If a priority is specified, it must follow after the checkbox, and must be separated by one space from surrounding elements.

The priority can be padded with dots on either side.

Any additional spaces to the right belong to the description copy.

There cannot be additional spaces to the left.

The dots cannot appear on both sides, or in between.

If the space between priority and description is missing, the exclamation mark is treated as part of the description.

Any exclamation marks after the priority don’t belong to the priority anymore, but are treated as description.

The description can contain a due date.

Due dates can be expressed through various patterns to reference a day, week, month, quarter or year.

Instead of a hyphen, the delimiter can also be a slash.

The delimiter style cannot be mixed, though.

Redundant due dates are not recognised.

Due dates can be surrounded by a space or punctuation (apart from a hyphen or slash).

Any other surrounding character makes the due date unrecognised.

The prefix must be exactly: a hyphen, a greater-than sign, and a space. Otherwise, the due date is not recognised.

Description can contain tags. A tag starts with a hashtag, followed by letters (as of the Unicode letter category), digits, hyphens, or underscores.

There can be multiple tags per description.

The tag is terminated by the first character that is not allowed in tags.

If there is no tag name, it’s not recognised.

The tag can have a value. The value is separated by an equals sign, and it can contain the same characters than the tag name.

The value can be empty or absent.

The number of tags per item is not limited.

For the tag value to contain other characters, the value can be quoted. In this case, the value is terminated by the closing quote.

Backslashes don’t have special meaning, i.e. escaping a quotation is not supported.

If the closing quote is missing (or doesn’t match), the value is disregarded altogether. That implies that a tag value cannot span multiple lines.

When consecutive items are surrounded by blank lines, they are considered to be a group.

“Blank line” means either the line is empty, or it only consists of whitespace.

An item cannot contain a blank line, even if the blank line is “indented” (i.e., has 4 spaces).

A group can be preceded by a headline.

If a headline is not followed by items, it refers to an empty group.

The headline can neither start with whitespace, nor with an opening square bracket.

A headline must be separated by a blank line from a preceding item.

The text of titles and descriptions (including tags) supports UTF-8 encoded text.