For what it’s worth, I think Joplin would benefit greatly from adding support for the http://todotxt.org/ formatting - basically as it already does with Markdown but with explicit support for (possibly) rearranging the note based on task priorities and such. I know I would personally find it very useful and I think it would position Joplin to be a much better to-do manager as well.
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Sorry about the necrobump. I love the todo.txt format and I feel this would work much better for me in joplin than the current situation. As it is, each todo item gets a whole note to itself. Whereas, it seems to me, a better situation would be you’d make a todo.txt note and you’d put multiple items in it, in todo.txt format.
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Joplin is using markdown, so adding a new format is rather out of the scope of this app. But maybe @laurent would accept a PR that allowed the use of the todo.txt format for to-dos.
There have been several requests to support other formats or switch to something like pandoc, asciidoc, dot, …, but please note that markdown is the core of Joplin. Asking to change the core is like asking a car manufacturer to transform your car into a boat.
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The thing with todo.txt is that just as the name implies, it’s a plain text format that is completely compatible with markdown. What exactly are you looking for when you request this? Automatic re-ordering of the todos? highlighting?
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I use Markor on my phone and what it does is I start typing my todo list and, as you say, it does highlighting. If I type one of the formatting notations like @context or +project or (A) [for priority], it will make them different colours to highlight it. Or if the line starts with an x it will show the item crossed through, as in done.
It would also be handy if it had the ability to filter items by project or order by priority. And, indeed, a formatting toolbar would great. But. I feel, these are less important to me.
I can see the beauty in keeping things simple and I wouldn't want to change it into a boat 
I suppose I just have never liked to a todo item works in joplin.
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Maybe I’m misunderstanding but todo.txt appears to be compatible with markdown since both are text-based formats. This would simply allow for additional context to be added to to-do list items e.g. due dates, prioritisation, sorting based on context/priority, etc.
For me it would really make the to-do list feature in Joplin quite powerful and far more useful than it currently is.
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Actually the problem is not that todo.txt is text-based – the problem is that it is not Markdown or a subset of it.
To include it efficiently, we would need a separate parser, editor, possibly viewer, a different renderer and a bunch of other internal technical details need to be handled separately. It would be a large rewrite, possibly meriting a fork.
With that said, Laurent and the other devs are trying to make a good plugin system for Joplin. If it is made as abstract and thus flexible a system as Atom or Eclipse, then it may be possible to include support for other formats such as todo.txt.
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would be great to have a plugin for that 