Linux

I'm after a thing that can work as a journaling, brainstorming and task managing tool, and I've yet to find the thing I'm after.

I used to work in rapid prototyping, we offered our services to the general public, and we'd get the occasional "citizen inventor" off the street with some napkin drawings or a mockup taped together out of cardboard, they'd describe their "invention" to me, and there was nothing I could do to convince them that it wouldn't work because it would require two solid objects to pass through each other or something else against the laws of kinematics. Your imagination allows you to think about impossible shapes. And that might be what's happening to me, that I want software that changes what it does to match what I want it to do at the time.

Also, just searched Mint's software manager for "todo" and came up with this:

TodoList: To-Do List & Tasks. Does not function without creating an account with...someone. Worthless.

Gnome-todo Like most Gnome applications, absolutely barebones, nowhere near enough features. Is also apparently known as "Endeavour". I'm guessing there was a backlash to giving software cute but not particularly descriptive names (like gnome's PGP keyring tool being named Seahorse? For some reason?) and so at some point they changed the names in some but not all places so the namespaces are nasal fucked. Great, thanks Gnome.

Getting Things GNOME! Hey, something that bears Gnome's name that isn't below minimum viable. Has a kind of Trello vibe, and if I were ONLY building checklists for things this might do but I"m also looking for note taking/journaling/brainstorming and this isn't it.

OpenToDoList Has a few of the features I'm looking for, but the UI is baby punching terrible. Lots of icons that aren't obvious what they're for with no tool tips and...it's just combative, it's trying really hard to be a pain.

Sleek So apparently there is a thing called a "todo.txt syntax" which is a plaintext format for arranging a todo list for cyborgs, and someone wrote a baby punching terrible GUI front end for it. A note for todo list app developers: When you click the little circle to check off an item, it should become checked off, not wait until you refresh the view in some other way like change to a different tab.

Adventure List Launches to a blank white window with a "Sign in with Google" button in the middle and no other controls. Worthless.

That seems to be it; lots of other stuff in here that doesn't seem relevant.

I mentioned PalmOS I think. Old PalmOS devices came with some default organization apps like a to-do list and a notes app and a calendar/clock and a contacts list, all burned into ROM. But really it was more like different facets of the same app; you could make a to-do list and then put it in your calendar, etc. It all worked together in a surprisingly seamless way I've yet to find since.