skan

Skan is a simple terminal kanban board. It has a focus of minimal configuration, a small core feature-set, and easy on-boarding.

Overview

As stated up above, the focus of skan is intentionally minimal. The swim lanes aren't configurable, meaning you can't add more or change them. While this may change in the future, for now it's intentional to simply focus on what you're working on and what you're not. This started as a project just to help myself keep track of various things that I was working on in various contexts of my life, meaning it's catered to my own workflow.

To understand skan, you only need a couple concepts:

1. Your main view (board) holds items either In Progress or in TODO status.
2. Each context has a separate board.
3. There are only a few screens/views
   1. Your main board view
   2. Your new item view
   3. Your context operation view
   4. Your edit context view

Getting Started

To get started with skan, you'll need to download the artifacts from the latest release found here. Currently only Linux and Mac are supported. Windows is supported, but you'll need to build from source locally.

MacOS

1. Download skan-x86_64-apple-darwin.tar.gz from releases.
2. Unzip via tar -xf skan-x86_64-apple-darwin.tar.gz
3. Move to your bin (or somewhere on your $PATH) mv skan-x86_64-apple-darwin/skan ~/bin/skan
4. Now you're ready to use skan.

Note that when on mac you'll probably get a warning about:

"skan" can’t be opened because Apple cannot check it for malicious software...

In order to get around this you'll need to run the following:

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine <path-to-skan>

Linux

1. Download skan-x86_64-linux.tar.gz from releases.
2. Unzip via tar -xf skan-x86_64-linux.tar.gz
3. Move to your bin (or somewhere on your $PATH) mv skan-x86_64-linux/skan ~/bin/skan
4. Now you're ready to use skan.

Building from source

If you'd like to build from source, see the instructions for building a native image in the CONTRIBUTING.md.

Usage

On the bottom of every screen you'll see a small help menu with the existing bindings. These will always be your reference if you're stuck. If you don't see this, you may have skan in too small of a space.

Creating a new item

To create a new item you'll want to enter the new item screen by using n when in your board view. This will allow you to give the item a title, a description, and a priority.

Creating/editing contexts

Contexts exist to separate your tasks into different categories. You can rename a context, add a new one, or delete one. You can choose which of these operations you'd like to make in the context view. You can get to this view by using c from your main board view. This view will show you your existing contexts, your current context, and a choice between context actions that you can choose:

Configuration

skan follows the various practices for each OS to determine where it should put the config and data files it needs:

• the XDG base directory and the XDG user directory specifications on Linux.
• the Known Folder API on Windows
• the Standard Directories guidelines on macOS

So in your config dir skan will look for a config.json file. The current configurations values and their defaults are below:

{
    "dataDir": "specific to your OS, see above for the default data dir",
    "zoneId": "GMT+2",
    "boardOrder": "priority"
}

If you ever want to see what the values of your config are or can't find your config, you can use i while inside of your main board view.

The other option for boardOrder is date.

Backups

When in the main board view b will trigger a backup, which will zip up all your contexts (which are just json files) and store them under backup in your datadir.