I agree in principal, though if the intent is to have the minimal amount of side-tracking while marking something as TODO for the future, I don’t think you can get better than a comment.

A nice cli interface for creating tickets in GitHub/Jira/etc. would help with that. I wonder, would it be nice to have a pre-commit hook that scans for TODO comments, removes them, and drafts tickets? Then both flows would work well.

I suppose it depends on how far you trust your ability to keep everything in your head, and reload everything coming back, and follow through on notes to self. I make todos too, but I try to honor a self-agreement that they be short lived and ideally not make it very far beyond my machine.

I linked https://github.com/dspinellis/git-issue in another comment but it gives a sense of the command line experience. I've also at times hacked up various scripts to create or modify items in github/jira/our internal POS, it can make things more likely to hit the tracker than to be met with a shrug. (It's so odd how sensitive programmers can be to even minor blocks in flow like a few seconds waiting for a webpage, or avoiding refactoring a method / class because in Java a new method might best belong to a new class which to do things 'proper' often entails a new file and then another new file for unit tests, adding them to version control, and all that takes like 30 seconds even with IDE support and is annoying.) I've at times thought about a small vim command that would call one of those scripts to create a new issue pre-templated with the file and location I was on, create, then insert the work item id, but never got around to it. As a pre-commit hook something to look for TODOs explicitly might be interesting, though I generally dislike hooks.

I have somethink like this in the pre-commit script: https://pastebin.com/XmMHTvZR

It works only for gitlab and assumes that the remote is named origin.

This will create an issue with the title text being everything after TODO. It does not support multiline and only looks at the newly added lines, but does not remove from the commit or alters them.

I don't really want to use a bug tracking system on my personal projects, though, so I can see why someone would choose to do the TODO or hash idea

If I don't write down everything I will forget what I am working on. Personal projects often get delayed by random things because they don't have a fixed schedule. After a while I forget what I am supposed to work on. What I do instead is I just write an issue with nothing more than a single sentence (often just a title with no body). If a new contributor wants to work on the project then they can use that issue as a starting point to join the project and ask for clarification how I want to it to be implemented.

I personally wanted to contribute to a few projects but it was difficult to track what is currently being worked on or what needs to be done. When an opensource developer only works 8 hours a week on a project you don't want to waste their limited time by having a dozen people ask them what needs to be done and then not doing anything (because a feature might not be relevant to you but you couldn't have known that because it wasn't written down).

> Using code comments really seems like the wrong place to prioritize changes.

It's a poor place for long-term tracking, but it's a great place for recording notes while minimizing context-switching cost while coding.