[sewer_bird]

Indeed! I keep my to-do lists in vim and have added a few lines to my syntax file to recognize/color a couple extra checkmarks like

- [?] question - [o] blocked by someone else - [~] in progress - [H] on hold - [Y] Is X true? (yes) - [N] Is Y true? (no)

[orev]

The vimwiki plugin more or less incorporates this idea and gives you some hot keys to change state.