One of the things I use in TextMate regularly is the apple-cmd-b key combo, to bring up a todo list for the current project. Whenever I have something planned in my code, but don’t feel like implementing it yet I annotate this piece of code with a comment like:

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// TODO: check if url exists before saving it
saveURL(url);

The todo plugin will list all these TODO’s from my code which gives me an indication on how to improve my code further.

The problem is that while I use TextMate for my web and java programming, I use XCode for most of the real programming done using Objective-C/Cocoa. But XCode doesn’t have the todo feature and there is no way to add plugin’s to XCode. Even a google search resulted in nothing on the subject.

So for now I’m using the Lightweight issue tracking bash script I found which seems like the only solution usable in combination with XCode.

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# grep for "TODO" string
todo()
{
  if [ $# -lt 1 ]; then
      grep -R -n "TODO: " . | grep -v ".svn"
  else
      # loop through the args
      while [ -n "$1" ]
      do
        grep -R -n "TODO: " "$1" | grep -v ".svn"
        shift
      done
  fi
}

Add this script to your ~/.bash_profile to be able to execute the todo command that searches the current directory, or the directories given as argument for // TODO: lines.