Skan is a simple terminal kanban board. It has a focus of minimal configuration, a small core feature-set, and easy on-boarding.
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:
- Your main view (board) holds items either In Progress or in TODO status.
- Each context has a separate board.
- There are only a few screens/views
- Your main board view
- Your new item view
- Your context operation view
- Your edit context view
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.
- Download
skan-x86_64-apple-darwin.tar.gz
from releases. - Unzip via
tar -xf skan-x86_64-apple-darwin.tar.gz
- Move to your bin (or somewhere on your
$PATH
)mv skan-x86_64-apple-darwin/skan ~/bin/skan
- 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>
- Download
skan-x86_64-linux.tar.gz
from releases. - Unzip via
tar -xf skan-x86_64-linux.tar.gz
- Move to your bin (or somewhere on your
$PATH
)mv skan-x86_64-linux/skan ~/bin/skan
- Now you're ready to use
skan
.
If you'd like to build from source, see the instructions for building a native
image in the CONTRIBUTING.md
.
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.
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
.
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:
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
.
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.