Just thought I’d mention my solution to this here, in case useful for someone. Nothing new conceptually – I’ve seen a number of mentions of using some form of text expansion to achieve checkbox lists. But perhaps a small new element in the implementation, which might be of some interest.
By way of background: In my workflow, I make a lot of notes on a project as I go, to document what I am doing and why, and how I am solving a problem – and I often make a checkbox list at the end of one segment of the project, to take stock of where I am, and as a guide to what I need to work on next. I’ve been making the checkbox lists right at the end of my notes on the particular segment of the project, all in OneNote. For me, it has felt really valuable to have the checkboxlists integrated with my documentation notes.
Now that I’m attempting to switch to DT, and having settled on RTF as the format I’m going to use for notes, I found that clickable chekbox lists are not possible within an RTF. I therefore experimented, as people have suggested here, with using checkbox lists in a different document that is still accessibel from DT (OmniOutliner; iAWriter; Notes; a Task list template) – but (for me) this felt disruptive as compared with having the checkbox list embedded in my notes.
So, my current low-tech solution (which hopefully will work well enough for me) is as shown below. Not real clickable cheboxes, but visually distinguishable nevertheless (both as to-dos, and as completed to-dos), and right where I want them in my RTF notes:
This is done using two snippet expansions in Alfred, with keywords !td (for orange “to-do”) and !dn (for green “done”).
So far, working for me … YMMV