ike

The Eisenhower matrix, in your terminal.

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An Eisenhower matrix task manager, named for the president who popularized the method ("Ike" was his campaign-era nickname). One binary, three ways in:

• TUI — run ike for an interactive 4-quadrant matrix
• CLI — ike add, ike done, … for quick capture and scripting
• MCP — ike mcp serves the Model Context Protocol so AI agents can manage your matrix

All three share a single JSON data file, safe against concurrent writes.

The matrix

	Urgent	Not urgent
Important	1 · Do It First	2 · Schedule It
Not important	3 · Delegate It	4 · Consider Eliminating It

Those headings are defaults, not fixed: rename any quadrant with t in the TUI or ike label. The quadrant numbers never change, so scripts and the MCP tools keep working whatever you call them.

Spaces

One data file holds several independent matrices, called spaces — work and personal, say. Each has its own tasks, archive, quadrant headings, ID numbering, and undo history, so ike undo in one can never reach into another. A fresh install has a single space named default, and nothing changes until you make a second.

ike space                       # list spaces, marking the current one
ike space new work              # create it (does not switch)
ike space use work              # switch; every later command follows
ike space rename work job
ike space rm work               # refuses a non-empty space without --force

Every command takes -s/--space NAME to act on one space just once, without switching:

ike add "Fix prod bug" -s work -q 1
ike list -s work

Two concepts worth keeping apart: a file is a document and contains spaces; a space is one matrix inside it. --file picks the document, --space picks the matrix. In the TUI, s opens a space picker and ]/[ move between spaces.

Deleting a space cannot be undone. History lives inside the space, so there is no stack left to revert from — which is why ike space rm names the counts it is about to destroy and needs --force if the space still holds anything. The previous file contents remain in tasks.json.bak until the next change.

Moving a matrix between machines

The data file is self-contained and fully portable: nothing in it refers to a path or a machine, and timestamps are stored in UTC. Copy it to another computer and every space comes with it. The sidecar .lock and .bak files do not need copying.

To move one space rather than the whole file:

ike space export work ~/work-matrix.json    # a standalone ike data file
# copy that one file to the other machine, then:
ike space import ~/work-matrix.json
ike space import ~/old.json --as archive-2025
ike --file ~/work-matrix.json list          # or just open it in place

An export is an ordinary data file, so --file opens it directly. MCP access is always off in an exported file, whatever it was in the original: agent access is a decision about a file on a machine, and an export is made to travel. Importing a name that is already in use is an error rather than a merge — use --as to bring it in under a different name.

Install

brew install jonascript/tap/ike

The formula builds from source, so Homebrew fetches Go for the build. Linux and macOS, Intel and Apple silicon.

Or with Go 1.25+:

go install github.com/jonascript/ike@latest

Or from a checkout, with a stamped version:

go build -ldflags "-X github.com/jonascript/ike/internal/cli.version=$(git describe --tags --always)" -o ike .

Prebuilt archives

Every release attaches archives for macOS and Linux on both architectures. They are not code-signed, so verify what you download — against checksums.txt:

shasum -a 256 -c checksums.txt --ignore-missing

and, if you have the GitHub CLI, against the build provenance ike publishes, which proves the archive was built by this repository's release workflow from the tag it claims:

gh attestation verify ike_0.1.0_darwin_arm64.tar.gz --repo jonascript/ike

TUI

Run ike with no arguments.

Key	Action
1–4, tab / shift+tab	focus quadrant
j/k or ↑/↓	select task
J/K or shift+↑/shift+↓	move task down/up within its quadrant
a	add task to focused quadrant
e	edit task title
t	rename the focused quadrant
x / enter	complete task (moves to archive)
m then 1–4	move task to quadrant
d twice	delete task permanently
u	undo the last change
U / ctrl+r	redo
v	archive view (r there restores a task)
s	space picker (enter switch, n new, r rename, d twice delete)
] / [	next / previous space
f	data file picker (o there types a path)
?	toggle help
q	quit

Changes made by the CLI or MCP server while the TUI is open appear within ~2 seconds.

A dim ◆ mcp marker sits in the footer while AI agent access is enabled; see MCP. No marker means nothing but you can reach the matrix.

CLI

ike add "Fix prod bug" -q 1     # quadrant 1-4; defaults to 2 (Schedule)
ike list                        # active tasks grouped by quadrant
ike list -q 1 --json            # filter + machine-readable output
ike done 3                      # complete task 3 (archives it)
ike mv 3 2                      # move task 3 to quadrant 2
ike reorder 3 up                # up | down | top | bottom, within its quadrant
ike rm 3                        # delete permanently (no archive)
ike archive                     # completed tasks, newest first
ike restore 3                   # un-archive task 3, back to its quadrant
ike undo                        # revert the last change, from any frontend
ike redo                        # re-apply the last undone change
ike label                       # show the four quadrant headings
ike label 1 "Firefighting"      # rename a quadrant
ike label 1 --reset             # restore its default name

ike space                       # spaces: see "Spaces" below
ike list -s work                # act on one space just this once
ike --file /path/to.json list   # act on a different data file

Renaming the quadrants

The default headings are Do It First, Schedule It, Delegate It, and Consider Eliminating It. Rename any of them with t in the TUI or ike label — up to 40 characters. Custom names are stored per data file and shared by all three frontends; a rename is undoable like any other change.

Only the display name changes. Quadrant numbers 1–4 and their urgent/important meanings are fixed, so ike add -q 1, the matrix layout, and the MCP tools are unaffected by whatever you call them. Clearing a name (empty input, or --reset) drops the override and restores the default, which also means a future release's defaults reach you rather than being frozen at rename time.

Undo and redo

Every change records a snapshot, so ike undo (or u in the TUI) reverts the last one — including a delete, and including changes made from a different frontend. Run it repeatedly to walk further back; the last 20 changes are kept in the data file, so history survives restarts. Undo does not recycle task IDs. History belongs to the space it was made in, so ike undo never reverts a change made in a different one.

ike redo (or U / ctrl+r) re-applies what you just undid, and is itself undoable. Any new change discards the redo history — that includes a change made from another frontend, so an MCP agent writing while your TUI is open will clear a redo you were holding. The alternative is replaying a snapshot from a branch you've diverged from, which would silently clobber the newer change. The TUI only shows the redo hint while a redo is actually available.

MCP

Agent access is off by default. ike will not serve your tasks over MCP until you say so, and registering ike with an MCP client is not enough on its own — ike mcp refuses to start while access is off:

ike mcp enable      # allow AI agents to read and manage this matrix
ike mcp disable     # revoke it, including for a session already connected
ike mcp status      # show the current setting and which data file it applies to

The setting is remembered in the data file, so it survives restarts and upgrades, and it is scoped to that file — which means every space in it. Enabling access for one space enables it for all of them; to keep a matrix out of reach, put it in a separate file (see Spaces) or pin the server to one space with ike -s work mcp. Access never travels: a space you export always lands with it switched off. It is not part of undo history — no sequence of ike undo can re-open access you closed. While access is on, the TUI shows a ◆ mcp marker in its footer, and ? explains the setting either way.

ike mcp disable takes effect immediately, including on a client that is already connected: the setting is re-checked on every read and every write, so the next thing an agent tries fails. It does not wait for the session to end.

What this is, and isn't. The gate is a consent mechanism, not a security boundary. It controls whether ike's MCP server will serve your matrix. It cannot restrain an agent that already has shell access on your machine — such an agent can read ~/.local/share/ike/tasks.json directly, run ike list, or simply run ike mcp enable itself. Treat it as "I have decided to let my agent manage my tasks", not as a sandbox.

Once enabled, ike mcp runs an MCP server on stdio with tools list_tasks, add_task, complete_task, move_task, reorder_task, update_task, delete_task, list_archive, restore_task, undo, redo, list_quadrants, set_quadrant_label, and list_spaces.

Every tool takes an optional space argument and defaults to whichever space you are on, so an agent can work in one matrix while you work in another. It is read-only about spaces: no tool can create, rename, delete, or switch one, since switching would change what your own TUI and a bare ike list show. Launching the server as ike -s work mcp pins it to that space — a request naming another is refused, and list_spaces then reports only the one it was launched for.

Register with Claude Code:

ike mcp enable
claude mcp add ike -- ike mcp

Or in any MCP client config:

{ "mcpServers": { "ike": { "command": "ike", "args": ["mcp"] } } }

Data

Tasks live in $XDG_DATA_HOME/ike/tasks.json (default ~/.local/share/ike/tasks.json), created mode 0600 in a 0700 directory — your matrix is not readable by other users on the machine.

Writes are serialized through a sidecar lock file and land via an atomic rename, so the TUI, CLI, and MCP server can run at the same time without losing updates. Each write is flushed to disk before the rename, and the previous contents are kept as tasks.json.bak, so an interrupted write costs at most one change rather than the whole matrix. If the file is ever unreadable, ike refuses to overwrite it rather than starting fresh over the top.

Override the location with --file or IKE_DATA_FILE — highest precedence first: --file, then IKE_DATA_FILE, then the default above. Either must be an absolute path whose parent directory already exists (a relative path would resolve against whatever directory the process happened to start in — not something you can predict when an MCP client launches ike for you).

One caveat on the concurrency guarantee: it relies on advisory flock, which is unreliable on NFS and some FUSE mounts — so pointing the data file at a Dropbox, iCloud, or network-mounted folder and writing from two machines at once is not covered. A single machine writing to a synced folder is fine.

Platform support

Linux and macOS. Both run the full test suite on every change, and release archives are built for darwin/amd64, darwin/arm64, linux/amd64, and linux/arm64.

Windows is not supported, and is not on the roadmap. It is not built, not released, and not tested. go install will probably give you a working binary — nothing in ike is deliberately Unix-only — but the data file would land at %USERPROFILE%\.local\share\ike\tasks.json, following XDG conventions rather than anywhere a Windows user would think to look, and no Windows path is exercised by CI. So: unsupported rather than known-broken. A pull request adding proper path resolution together with Windows CI coverage would be welcome; one without the CI would just move the untested surface around.

Contributing

Bug reports and focused pull requests are welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the build commands, how the three frontends sit over one store, and the store invariants worth knowing before changing it. Security issues go through SECURITY.md rather than the issue tracker.

License

MIT. Third-party dependencies and their licenses — all permissive, none copyleft — are listed in THIRD_PARTY_LICENSES.md.

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Logo based on Eisenhower's official White House portrait of May 29, 1959 (White House / Eisenhower Presidential Library). It is a work of an employee of the Executive Office of the President made as part of their official duties, and so is in the public domain as a work of the U.S. federal government. No attribution is required; it is recorded here so anyone redistributing ike can verify the claim for themselves.