In Vim, you can place the cursor on a file name and press "gf" to open that file in a buffer. So, have a directory with your TODO files, one task per file. Then

In Vim, you can place the cursor on a file name and press "gf" to open that file in a buffer. So, have a directory with your TODO files, one task per file. Then, inside the file put stuff like due date and description, then for dependencies or subtasks just write in the filenames for those tasks. They can either be relative paths, or you can `:set path=/path/to/todos` and just write the filenames. For an overview of everything, you can also just open the directory. I'm sure emacs can do something similar if you're really resistant to org-mode. If it's not built in, it seems like it would be trivial to add with elisp.