🎉 Kanban Board — The First Real Application Built with Blaise!

[graemeg]

I'm excited to share a milestone for the Blaise compiler project: our very first real-world application, built entirely in Blaise — a terminal-based Kanban board for tracking tasks!

What is it?

A lightweight TUI (Terminal User Interface) Kanban board that runs in your terminal. Three columns — Todo, In Progress, Done — with vim-style keybindings, priority tagging, and per-task detail notes via your $EDITOR. All state is stored in a simple, human-readable .kanban text file.

Why this matters

This isn't a toy example or a hello-world demo. The kanban tool is something I'll actually use day-to-day to track Blaise compiler bugs and features (that wasn't reported by the community). It exercises real language features:

• 🏗️ Records with methods — the DateUtils unit's TDate, TTime, TDateTime, and TInstant record types, complete with method calls on nested record fields
• 🧵 String handling under ARC — automatic reference counting keeps memory clean without manual Free calls on strings
• 📦 Object-oriented design — TBoard, TTask, TTerminal, TKanbanUI classes with constructors, destructors, properties
• 📚 Standard library usage — Classes, StrUtils, DateUtils, Contnrs — all compiled by Blaise
• 🖥️ Low-level terminal I/O — raw mode, ANSI escape sequences, box-drawing characters, all from Pascal

Features

• Three-column board with colour-coded columns (cyan/yellow/green)
• Vim keybindings — j/k to navigate, h/l to move tasks between columns, Tab/arrows for columns
• Priority levels — cycle with p (high !, normal, low .)
• Task details — press Enter to view, e to edit in $EDITOR
• Persistent storage — plain-text .kanban files you can read and version-control
• UTC timestamps — created dates stored as ISO 8601 UTC, displayed in local time

Try it yourself

# Build (requires the Blaise compiler)
pasbuild compile -m blaise-kanban --compiler compiler/target/blaise

# Run
tools/kanban/target/kanban my-tasks.kanban

The .kanban file format is dead simple — here's what it looks like:

#next-id: 3

## Todo
- 1 | Write documentation | priority:high | created:2026-06-05T09:00:00

## In Progress
- 2 | Review pull requests | created:2026-06-05T10:30:00

## Done

What's next?

This is just the beginning. Having a real application that we use daily is the best way to find bugs, stress-test the compiler, and validate language design decisions. Every feature the kanban app needs but can't yet express becomes a compiler improvement.

If you've been following the Blaise project, give the kanban tool a spin and let me know what you think! 💬

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The kanban tool lives at tools/kanban/ in the repository and is built as a standard PasBuild module alongside the compiler and migration analyser.

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Built with ❤ for the Pascal community by Graeme.

[graemeg]

I thought why not give pasbuild package some exercise too. Here is an attached binary created by pasbuild. 🎉

blaise-kanban-0.10.0-SNAPSHOT.zip

[graemeg]

@andrewd207 We'll have to port your TUI library at some point. 😉

[Schmitty2005]

YES! 💯

[andrewd207]

@graemeg hahahah, with the best of humor: make it not crash and we will.
But honestly I didn't try to port it yet it might work already...

Edit: It has a threaded event loop, so it needs some features that threads don't have yet. Safe memory across threads. CheckSynchronize. Whatever else that would become apparent in the actual process.

[graemeg]

@andrewd207 yeah, last night I had a quick peek at you code, and quickly realise Blaise is not there yet. So wrote something simpler. Back to bug fixing for me. 😂 But it did give me more motivation for sure!

[Schmitty2005]

Kanban works good here!

[graemeg]

Thanks for testing. I'm already planning a few improvements, so I can test more Blaise features. So watch this space. 😉