tda

A keyboard-first tool to capture, organize, and refine tasks — linearly and as graphs/trees — for both humans and AI agents.

Why tda

Todoist and Superproductivity are great personal task managers, but they're built for a single person clicking around a list. Jira is built for teams, but the account/permissions/workflow ceremony makes it painful for fast, personal capture. tda tries to sit between them:

• Keyboard-first, capture at typing speed — batch-add tasks, navigate like a file manager, no mouse required.
• Team-aware, without accounts. There's no login, no auth system — it's a local-first, single trusted store — but assignment is still a first-class, optional, multi-valued capability: a task can have 0–n assignees, and each one can be a person or an agent. Not a single-user tool, just one without account ceremony.
• A tree and a graph. Tasks live in one structural hierarchy (for breadcrumbs and priority) plus an independent blocks dependency DAG (for "what's blocking what") — see backlog.md and breads for kindred ideas on file/git-native task graphs.
• Built for AI agents as first-class users, not just humans with a chatbot bolted on: agents can be assignees, claim work, and get full parent context — see AI agent integration below.

The full design rationale lives in tda-spec.md.

Features

• Batch keyboard capture — one task per line, no per-task dialog friction.
• Arbitrary-depth hierarchy (single-parent child tree) plus a blocks dependency DAG for cross-cutting "blocked by" relationships.
• Manual ordering (drag-free reorder = priority) and saved/derived query views (e.g. "what next", "due today") with their own sort.
• À la carte capabilities per task: Status, Notes (Markdown), Schedule, Estimate, Tags, Assignment (0–n, human or agent), Recurrence, IssueRef, Attachments, TimeLog.
• Claim/delegate: a todo task can be claimed by anyone (or only its assignee, if one is set), handing off with full parent context.
• Aggregation up the tree: subtree progress %, summed estimate/time-spent, earliest due date — each capability defines its own roll-up.
• Markdown and JSON import/export of any list or branch.

See tda-spec.md §2 and §4 for the full requirements list.

Screenshot

Early build of the TUI — tree view with per-task status/progress bars, due dates, and ETA projection.

Install

Homebrew (macOS/Linux):

brew install davidB/tap/tda

Shell installer (macOS/Linux):

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -LsSf https://github.com/davidB/todoapp/releases/latest/download/todoapp-cli-installer.sh | sh

mise (via the github backend, pulls the prebuilt GitHub release binary):

mise use -g "github:davidB/todoapp[exe=tda]"

From source:

cargo install --path crates/todoapp-cli

Prebuilt binaries for macOS (Apple Silicon/Intel) and Linux are also available on the releases page.

TUI

The tda binary (built from todoapp-cli) launches a full-screen, keyboard-only TUI by default:

tda                             # or: tda tui

Key	Action
j/k, ↑/↓	move up/down
h/l, ←/→	collapse / expand
g / G	jump to first / last
a	add sibling of cursor · at root: add root task
e	edit task title/notes
space	cycle status
c	claim (→ wip, actor me)
alt+↑ / alt+↓	reorder among siblings
alt+→ / alt+←	reparent in / out
/	text search
n	jump to "what next"
y	yank (copy) title to clipboard
enter	view detail
?	toggle help
esc	quit / back

Data is stored via the Turso adapter at $TDA_DB, or ~/.local/share/tda/tda.db if unset.

The tda binary can also be driven non-interactively for scripting and agents:

tda ls                 # list tasks (tree, JSON or Markdown)
tda add "buy milk"      # capture a task
tda claim <id>          # claim → wip
tda export > backup.md  # export a branch to Markdown/JSON
tda import < backup.md  # round-trip it back in

AI agent integration

The capability model and parent-context propagation (an assignee working a child task can see its ancestors' titles/notes) were designed with agents in mind from the start, not bolted on:

• Today: the tda CLI is scriptable and gives structured JSON output, usable by any agent that can shell out.
• Planned (tda-spec.md §10, milestone M5): an HTTP API (todoapp-api) and an MCP server (todoapp-mcp) for agents that speak those protocols directly.

Status / Roadmap

Pre-release (0.0.0, not yet published). Current state, per tda-spec.md §10:

• ✅ M0 — workspace skeleton, CI gates.
• ✅ M1 — domain core, in-memory store, decider machinery, full test coverage.
• ✅ M2 — Turso persistence adapter, shared conformance suite.
• 🚧 M4 — TUI (in progress, delivered ahead of M3 by design).
• ⏳ M3 — CLI dogfood milestone (tda self-hosts tda-spec.md as its own task tree).
• ⏳ M5 — HTTP API + MCP server for agents.
• ⏳ M6 — templates, richer dependency views, aggregation caching, GUI.

Architecture

Hexagonal: adapters → app → core, enforced by mise run lint. Nothing in todoapp-core may import an adapter, a runtime, or a framework.

Crate	Role
todoapp-core	Domain: entities, capabilities, ports. No I/O.
todoapp-app	Use cases: async orchestration of core + ports.
todoapp-store-mem	Adapter: in-memory store for tests/dev.
todoapp-store-turso	Adapter: Turso/SQLite persistence.
todoapp-conformance	Shared port-conformance suite, run against every store.
todoapp-tui	Adapter: the ratatui TUI (library, consumed by todoapp-cli).
todoapp-cli	Adapter: the tda binary — CLI + launches the TUI.

See tda-spec.md §5 for the full rationale, including the planned todoapp-api/todoapp-mcp/todoapp-ui-core adapters.

Development

mise run build   # build the workspace
mise run test    # run all tests (insta snapshots, proptest, conformance)
mise run lint    # clippy + the core-no-io dependency-rule check
mise run ci      # the full gate — run before committing

See CLAUDE.md for conventions and tda-spec.md for the full spec.

License

Apache-2.0 — see LICENSE.