kitlist - A list manager for maintaining kit lists
kitlist [options]
Kitlist allows you to maintain lists of kit that you may require for various activities. These may be for a vacation or a business trip.
The concept is that you maintain a full list of all items you may require for any activity. Items can be grouped into categories. Each item may be in many categories, so any changes to an item are immediately reflected in all categories that it belongs to. Items are copied to and removed from categories using the cut, copy and paste functions.
Simple usage is to create a new category for a trip, peruse the full list of items selecting those required for the trip. Then copying those selected items to the new category. When packing for the trip, all check-boxes are cleared and the list filtered to show only unchecked items. Each item is ticked off as it is packed.
A more sophisticated usage is to maintain categories for specific tasks. E.g. Camping, hiking, flying, business, vacation, foreign travel, documents, driving, cycling, horse-riding etc. When you go on a trip, you create a specific category for that trip, then copy items from each of the appropriate activities to the new category. Items cannot be duplicated within a category, so combining items that exist in many categories does not result in duplication.
This can be very useful for activities that turn up at short notice. You can also use it to perform virtual packing over a period of time before a trip, thereby decreasing the chances of forgetting anything. Be careful this doesn't encourage you to take more than you really need!
Of course Kitlist can also be used as a general list manager, todo list, shopping list or whatever.
Each list is stored in an XML document. The DTD for the XML document is distributed with the source. The application remembers the last used file and reloads it on startup, if it exists. It also maintains a list of most recently loaded files to make it easier to manage a number of lists. GConf is used to store these settings, so they can be listed and edited using gconftool-2 and gconf-editor. Perhaps a future version of Kitlist will provide a preferences page to modify these.
The source code can be compiled to create a version to run on a desktop platform. Optionally the desktop version can also be compiled to use a PostgreSQL database version instead of using an XML document. Compilation is done in the GNU way. Use './configure --help' to list the optional configure parameters. See the README file in the source distribution for more information.
The Kitlist source code and documentation can be downloaded from http://www.smartpixie.com/kitlist/.