Is there a way to specify the order of the tasks in the task panel of the TUI?

[Stan-Stani]

Summary

Alternatively, is there a way to at least set the one that's initially focused?

Additional information

No response

Example

No response

[luskin]

This would be a great feature. We have over 30 tasks running and it can be a real pain sometimes to get down to the task you need to inspect.

[anthonyshew]

There is no way to specify an order for the task list. What order would you want to create? Additionally, are you able to guarantee that every developer in the repository would want the same order?

I would ask the same question about the initial focus as well. The task that you may believe to be the most important may not be the one that others in the repo be the most important one, so how can we assign the right initial task universally?

[anthonyshew]

Was thinking about this more. I think there's a way that we could write to disk in .turbo whenever you select a task in the TUI and, the next time you open the TUI, we would know to open on that task. So, if you close the TUI with web#dev as your last selected task, it would open again with web#dev selected from the start.

[traviswimer]

I would definitely prefer that solution over something like a CLI flag, since it "just works" rather than being some config you need to remember and be aware of.

Also I think a really simple improvement that could be made for the ordering of tasks would be to sort the tasks alphabetically by default. Currently, you have no way of knowing what order your tasks will be in. I think ensuring the order is at least consistent on every run would make a big difference.

[luskin]

@anthonyshew That's the exact use-case that would satisfy our needs. Right now all the engineers have to key down until they reach our nextjs web task, which sometimes can be 20+ clicks!

[jroru]

What about using the dependency topology here? In my use-case I'm interested in having the root web app dev server shown in position 1 and selected by default.

I'm sure there are cases where that's not the desire, but it seems to me that it would mostly be the case.

[anthonyshew]

#9146 (comment)

[jroru]

@anthonyshew any thoughts on using the topology instead of/as well as the proposal you linked?

[anthonyshew]

I have the same questions as I did before: What order would you want to create? Additionally, are you able to guarantee that every developer in the repository would want the same order?

The task graph itself is non-deterministic, so we can't guarantee that your task graph will evaluate into the order the same every time - which is why you see the differences that you do today. Since we can't rely on that, we need some sensible default that makes sense in all cases, but I'm not sure what that might be.

[mifopen]

What order would you want to create?

Alphanumeric.

are you able to guarantee that every developer in the repository would want the same order?

Yes, 100%.

The logic here is very simple, any order that:

1. is deterministic
2. is easy to scan through with your eyes
3. does not "jump"

is preferable to any other.

The only scenario when the order even matters is when you have some persistent tasks in the list (because otherwise it's anyway short-living UI that can close at any moment). It means that you have some long-running jobs that you want to look at from time to time. I cannot imagine why I would want to have any logic that contradicts to the points above.

For us this is the number one UX problem with the tool. Of course it would be nice to have a way to filter the list in process, but this is another story.

@anthonyshew, what do you think?
Would happily discuss it further. :)

PS. The suggestion does not contradict to your suggestion in the thread marked as "answer". It is useful to have some kind of "view persistence" from run to run. Same probably should be true for any other "action" that you can do in tui (e.g. hide/show sidepanel).

PPS. Of course you can have a mix of long-running and short-running tasks in the list. I do not think that it is an excuse for reordering the list in process. I still would like to check results of those short-running tasks without chasing them from top to bottom of the list. Some shortcut to hide completed tasks is good alternative in my opinion. (Could be also persisted as a TUI setting locally).

[anthonyshew]

Unfortunately, alphanumeric isn't as obvious as it may seem. We also have heard feedback that alphanumeric is clearly not the right solution, and that topological ordering would be vastly preferable. While we do realize having the order be non-deterministic isn't ideal, it's still not clear what the right solution is - or that we may need to simply make a decision on an ordering strategy, accepting its faults, and go with it.

The only scenario when the order even matters is when you have some persistent tasks in the list

This isn't correct. You can be running non-persistent tasks that take awhile to finish, and want to scroll around in the task list to take a look at how things went. I can imagine that someone doing this would want to intuit the ordering for all status groups of their tasks, not only for the in-progress ones.

it would be nice to have a way to filter the list

You can with /. It appears we haven't provided a UI hint for that, which we can fix.