Task Cascade

Task Cascade keeps a parent checklist item's status in sync with its children, and adds a quick shortcut for tagging a task to be deleted once it's done.

※ Note: Tasks are ordered from top to bottom. Their horizontal positions in the image are adjusted for compactness and do not reflect the actual layout.

• How it works
• Supported statuses
• Configurable rules
• Settings
• Manual installation
• Alternatives
• Development
• Release Notes

[!WARNING] Task Cascade 1.0.0 and later requires Obsidian 1.13.0 or newer due to its use of the declarative settings API.
If you're using an older version of Obsidian, install Task Cascade 0.2.2, the last compatible release.

How it works

Task Cascade watches editor changes with a short debounce, walks the checklist bottom-up so children are resolved before their parents, and only rewrites a checkbox's marker when the computed status actually differs from what's on the line — so it never touches lines that don't need to change.

Supported statuses

Unrecognized or missing checkbox status

A checkbox whose status is a single character that isn't one of the markers above (e.g. - [⁇]) counts toward its parent's rules as a configurable default status — Todo, Done, Cancelled, or In Progress (Todo by default). Plain list items that aren't checkboxes at all, and malformed checkboxes with empty (- []) or multi-character (- [xyz]) brackets, are always ignored — they never affect a parent's computed status.

Configurable rules

Whenever you edit a checklist, Task Cascade looks at each parent's children and decides whether the parent's own status should change. The decision is made by an ordered list of rules — the first rule that matches wins.

Each rule has:

• An ALL or ANY quantifier — does every child need to match, or just one?
• An expression combining status names with and, or, and not (e.g. done or cancelled or forwarded).
• An outcome status the parent becomes when the rule matches.
• An enabled switch, so a rule can be turned off without deleting it.

The default rules ship ready to use:

1. All children Done → Done
2. All children Cancelled → Cancelled
3. All children Forwarded → Forwarded
4. All children Todo → Todo
5. All children Done, Cancelled, or Forwarded → Done
6. Any child not Cancelled and not Forwarded → In Progress

If nothing matches, the parent is left untouched.

Settings

Open Settings → Community plugins → Task Cascade to:

• Preview rules — check off which statuses are present among a set of children and see which rule fires and what the parent would become, without touching a real file.
• Set the unknown-checkbox default — pick which status (Todo, Done, Cancelled, or In Progress) a checkbox with an unrecognized single-character marker counts as; this same value can be toggled on in the rule preview to see its effect.
• Edit rules — change any rule's quantifier, expression, or outcome; add new rules; reorder or delete existing ones; reset back to the defaults at any time.
• Toggle the #task. shortcut — typing a period immediately after #task on a checklist line removes the period and appends 🏁delete to the line, so you can keep typing the task's description right after the tag. Turn this off if you don't use it.

Manual installation

If Task Cascade isn't available in the Community plugins catalog yet, you can install it manually from the GitHub repository:

1. Go to the latest release and download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css.
2. Create a folder named task-cascade inside your vault's .obsidian/plugins/ directory and place the three downloaded files there.
3. In Obsidian, open Settings → Community plugins, reload the plugin list if needed, and enable Task Cascade.

Alternatives

• Checkbox Autochecker (by klaasklee) – offers predefined 3 propagation modes (Loose, Partial, and Strict) to control exactly how parent and child checkboxes sync in both upward and downward directions.
• Checkbox Sync (by groldsf) – focus on multi-status logic, this plugin provides straightforward bidirectional syncing paired with built-in rules to ignore specific files or folders from processing.

Development

Requirements: Node.js and npm installed.

1. Check esbuild.config.mjs exists. The dev/build npm scripts call it directly (node esbuild.config.mjs) — without it the build won't even start. The standard config bundles from src/main.ts to main.js, with external: ["obsidian", "electron", ...], format: "cjs".

2. Install dependencies:

   npm install
   

   Creates node_modules and package-lock.json, using devDependencies (esbuild, typescript) and dependencies (obsidian).

3. Build the plugin:

   npm run build
   

   Equivalent to tsc -noEmit -skipLibCheck && node esbuild.config.mjs production — type-checks first, then produces a minified main.js.

4. Watch mode for development (optional):

   npm run dev
   

   Runs esbuild in watch mode without minification (node esbuild.config.mjs without production).

   Verify the build succeeded by checking npm run build exits with code 0 and main.js has been updated.

Release Notes

1.0.0

• Migrated the settings UI to Obsidian's new declarative Settings API (now requires Obsidian 1.13.0 or newer — see the warning above for older versions)
• Rules can now be reordered by dragging, not just with up/down buttons
• "Reset rules to defaults" now asks for confirmation before replacing all rules
• Invalid rule expressions now show a clearer error banner instead of just recoloring the row description

0.2.1

• Configurable default status for checkboxes with an unrecognized single-character marker (list items without a checkbox, and empty/multi-character brackets, are still ignored)

0.1.0

• Preview plate
• Auto removed task option
• Configurable rules
• Delete task on done when dot at the end