Ecco Notepads — Usage

Vault-native Ecco notepads: a Markdown outline with inline fields, plus two views (filtered+nested list, sortable table). Built alongside Ecco Pro — nothing is migrated out of it. ecco-notepads-build task: Focus/Tasks/ecco-notepads-build.md.

Status as of 2026-08-20: Phase 0-3 done (CLI self-verification, shared engine, Today.md live trial, entry template). Phase 4 (remaining notepads) is deliberately not started — gated on Phase 2 surviving a week of real use. Phase 5 (this note) written early since it doesn’t depend on that trial.

The fields

Ecco’s real column set, reproduced as inline fields on each list item:

Field	Meaning	Example values
abc	Priority	A, B, C
status	State	todo, WIP, waiting, recurring, done
action	Next physical action (optional)	call, ask, buy, decide
focus	Time horizon	today, thisWeek, someday

Written directly on the bullet: - Item text [abc:: A] [status:: WIP] [focus:: today].

How to add an item

1. Place the cursor at the end of a line in a notepad’s ## Outline.
2. Run Templater: Insert Ecco Item (hotkey bound and confirmed working, or Command Palette). It prompts for ABC / Status / Action / Focus, then writes the fielded bullet with the cursor left where the item’s text goes.
3. Type the item text.

How to make a new notepad

1. Create a Markdown file anywhere under Focus/ with an ## Outline heading and your items below it.
2. Add a filtered+nested view:

   dv.view("Focus/scripts/ecco-view", {
       field: "focus", value: "today",
       source: '"path/to/your/notepad"'
   });

3. Add a table view (columns, no engine needed — plain Dataview):

   TABLE WITHOUT ID regexreplace(item.text, "\s*\[\w+::[^\]]*\]", "") AS "Item", item.abc AS "ABC", item.status AS "Status", item.action AS "Action", item.focus AS "Focus"
   FROM "path/to/your/notepad"
   FLATTEN file.lists AS item
   WHERE item.abc
   SORT item.abc ASC

Today.md is a working example of both.

What this does NOT do versus Ecco

• No single always-visible window — each notepad is a file you open, not a persistent pane.
• No drag-and-drop reordering of items between notepads/status columns — editing is text.
• No any-device sync — out of scope by Talbot’s decision (unmade).
• Entry is still slower than Ecco’s native UI even with the template (prompts vs. instant columns) — the honest gap named in Phase 3. Not yet measured against a week of real typing.
• Only one level of “ancestor context” is proven at scale; deeper edge cases weren’t hammered beyond the 4-level proof outline.

How to undo the whole thing

Nothing here touches Ecco. To remove:

1. Delete Focus/scripts/ecco-view.js and ecco-view.test.mjs.
2. Delete any notepad files built this way (Today.md, plus whatever Phase 4 adds later).
3. Delete Core/Processes/Projects/KB-OS/Templates/Ecco Item.md and remove it from Templater’s Settings → enabled-hotkey-templates list if bound.
4. Delete this file and Core/IT/Utils/Custom/ecco-view.md / obsidian-cli.md. No plugins were added (Dataview, Templater, cmdr were already installed) — nothing to uninstall.

Known gaps (honest, per the task’s success criteria)

• Today.md’s current outline is seeded from Core/DASHBOARD.md’s Biggest Rocks + Core/_WorkingOn/Tasks/_active.md — real, sourced current work, but not Talbot’s actual Ecco Today content (unreachable from here). The one-week kill-criterion trial starts from this seed.
• Phase 4 (remaining 12 notepads) not started — correctly gated on the trial above.