condash

Standalone desktop dashboard for a Markdown-first project-tracking tree — projects, incidents, and documents all live as plain .md files you already edit.

condash walks a projects/YYYY-MM/YYYY-MM-DD-<slug>/ tree under a single conception root and renders a live dashboard of every item: its status, steps, notes, deliverables, and linked code. There is no database, no sync server, no account. The Markdown files are the source of truth; condash is the view layer.

Full documentation, with tutorials and screenshots, lives at condash.vcoeur.com.

Install

pipx install condash
# or: uv tool install condash

Both install the CLI into its own isolated virtualenv and put condash on your $PATH. Install size is roughly 100 MB because of the bundled Qt wheels — that's the cost of "works everywhere with one command".

System prerequisites

None on Linux, macOS, or Windows. pywebview[qt] pulls PyQt6 + PyQt6-WebEngine from PyPI and those wheels bundle Qt itself:

• Linux — prefers GTK/WebKit if python3-gi is installed system-wide, falls back to the bundled Qt backend otherwise.
• macOS — uses the native Cocoa WebKit backend.
• Windows — uses the native Edge WebView2 backend.

To skip the native window entirely, set native = false in your config and open the dashboard in your browser at http://127.0.0.1:<port> — see Configure the conception path.

Development from a source checkout

git clone https://github.com/vcoeur/condash-python.git
cd condash
uv sync --all-extras
make frontend               # bundle assets/src/{js,css}/ → assets/dist/ (esbuild via npx)
uv run condash --version
uv run condash

make frontend is only needed when the source under src/condash/assets/src/ changes — the built dist/bundle.{js,css} files are committed so pip install condash from sdist works without a Node toolchain. It invokes esbuild transiently through npx --yes, so no node_modules/ is created.

First launch

condash doesn't ship a working default config — it has no way to guess where your conception tree lives. Bootstrap one:

condash init           # writes a commented template at ~/.config/condash/config.toml
condash config edit    # opens it in $VISUAL / $EDITOR

The only required key is conception_path:

conception_path = "/path/to/conception"
port            = 0      # 0 = OS picks a free port
native          = true   # false = open in your browser

Everything else — the workspace of code repos, the "open in IDE" launchers, per-machine preferences — lives in two YAML files inside the conception tree (<conception_path>/config/repositories.yml and <conception_path>/config/preferences.yml), so teammates who pull the tree get the same layout automatically. The gear icon in the dashboard header opens an in-app editor for all three files.

Full schema: Config files reference.

What it does

• Renders a live dashboard of every projects/YYYY-MM/YYYY-MM-DD-<slug>/README.md, grouped by status (now / soon / later / backlog / review / done). Drag cards between columns to rewrite the **Status**: line in place. Unknown status values surface a red !? badge so typos don't silently land in backlog.
• Tracks steps and deliverables parsed from the README body — - [ ]/- [~]/- [x]/- [-] checkboxes, ## Deliverables PDF links. A click on a checkbox rewrites the line.
• An embedded terminal (vendored xterm.js) for ad-hoc commands, plus an inline dev-server runner (since v0.13.0) that starts your make dev / npm run dev / cargo watch under a PTY and streams output into a xterm mounted right under the repo row.
• A repo strip (the Code tab) with per-repo dirty counts, worktree nesting, and per-repo inline runners. Each repo gets vendor-neutral main_ide, secondary_ide, and terminal launcher buttons wired to your own commands via a fallback chain.
• A knowledge tree (optional knowledge/ sibling of projects/) rendered as a browsable tab — the right place for durable reference material that outlives any one project.
• Wikilinks ([[slug]]) between items, resolved by short-slug match across the whole tree.
• A vendored PDF viewer (Mozilla PDF.js, minified) for ## Deliverables — no OS handler involved, theme-aware toolbar.
• Fully offline: every browser dependency (PDF.js, xterm.js, CodeMirror 6 with YAML + Markdown, Mermaid) is vendored under src/condash/assets/vendor/ and served from /vendor/…. Minified-where-possible; no runtime fetch to a CDN.
• Fingerprinted auto-refresh so edits made in your external editor surface in the dashboard within 5 seconds without flickering the page.

All of it is thin — condash is a FastAPI + NiceGUI layer over a directory of Markdown files, and the design is mostly about keeping it that way as features accumulate.

CLI

condash                         # open the dashboard window
condash --version               # print version and exit
condash --conception-path PATH  # one-shot override (does not touch config file)
condash --config PATH           # use a different config file
condash --port N                # one-shot port override
condash --no-native             # open in your browser instead of a desktop window

condash init                    # write a commented config template if missing
condash config show             # print the effective (merged) configuration
condash config path             # print the resolved config file path
condash config edit             # open the config in $VISUAL / $EDITOR

condash install-desktop         # register condash with the XDG launcher (Linux)
condash uninstall-desktop       # remove the user-local desktop entry (Linux)

Full reference: CLI.

Linux: register condash in your application launcher

condash install-desktop

Writes a user-local XDG desktop entry + the bundled SVG icon, so condash appears in GNOME Activities, KDE Kickoff, Cinnamon, and other launchers:

• ~/.local/share/applications/condash.desktop — launcher entry, pointing at the absolute path of whichever condash binary you ran the command with
• ~/.local/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps/condash.svg — the app icon

No sudo, no system-wide changes. Remove later with condash uninstall-desktop. The native window also picks up the same icon at runtime, so it appears in your taskbar / Alt-Tab switcher.

Claude Code skill

A minimal example SKILL.md ships at the repo root — drop it into ~/.claude/skills/condash/ (or <project>/.claude/skills/condash/) to drive the non-interactive CLI surface from a Claude Code session: condash init, condash config show / path / edit, condash install-desktop. Launching the native window from inside an agent is deliberately out of scope — run condash by hand for that.

Status

Version 0.14.1. Linux-first but tested on all three desktop platforms. The docs site at condash.vcoeur.com tracks current behaviour; the CHANGELOG on GitHub has the release-by-release history.

Links

• Documentation: condash.vcoeur.com
• Source: github.com/vcoeur/condash
• PyPI: pypi.org/project/condash

License

MIT — see LICENSE.