Files
lanework/DESIGN
rzen 16c10d61c3 Pivot the trash to a materialized .trash — cards only, no Put Back
The tombstone model is retired wholesale: deletion is a move into the reserved
<root>/.trash/, always entering at the top (rank minting — no deleted: key, no
timestamp sort), with modified stamped for the future age-based purge. Lanes
are never trashed — lane delete is physical, native undo in-session the net.
Put Back is gone: restore is drag-out or cut+paste (⌘X now enabled in the
trash as the keyboard restore path). Trash cards are ordinary cards — search,
selection, clipboard, and rendering uniform — and one container boundary
replaces the effective-liveness, ancestor-walk, and kind-homogeneity machinery
across 02 and 04. Delete stages by place (board moves, trash deletes
permanently under the recoverability confirm); legacy deleted: keys migrate
without destroying (cards relocate, lanes return live, notices). Templates
exclude .trash; Duplicate carries it; the agent guide teaches delete-as-move.
Materialized reserved lanes are named as a pattern — .archive is WISHLIST #8,
and the backed-out release-presentation question is marked open in 03.

Ruling: Redesign board Resolved card e8f1a6c2; 19 mooted tombstone-era rulings
moved to the board's new Mooted lane.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01CqjXB7ASoWtbyoGod68k97
2026-07-28 16:02:08 -04:00
..
2026-07-26 14:58:16 -04:00

Lanework — Design Documents

A ground-up rewrite of the Kanban app, to ship as Lanework on the Mac App Store. The old repo (../../Kanban, one level above this repository — not the rewrite's own Kanban/ source folder, which shares the codename) was a pathfinder — it never shipped, but it is the reference implementation and the source of hard-won decisions. This design starts from a clean slate and keeps only what earned its place. The rewrite keeps the internal codename Kanban (bundle id dev.rzen.indie.Kanban).

Each document covers one aspect of the design. Within each:

  • Decisions — settled, either carried over from the old app or newly made.
  • Changes from Kanban — where this rewrite deliberately diverges.
  • Open questions — flagged for iteration; nothing here is implicitly settled.

Index

Doc Aspect
00-vision.md What Lanework is, who it's for, goals and non-goals
01-storage-format.md On-disk contract: folders, frontmatter, ordering, the materialized trash
02-architecture.md App structure: source of truth, stores, watchers, concurrency
03-board-ui.md Board window: layout, lanes, cards, styling, templates
04-interactions.md Selection, drag & drop, keyboard, clipboard, search
05-card-window.md The card window: Markdown preview/edit, attachments
06-history-undo.md Git-backed undo/redo and history — Pro edition
07-sync-collab.md Board modes: local-only, git; iCloud Drive warned against — Pro edition
08-agent-integration.md AI agents as first-class users of the board
09-templates.md Board templates: inventory and definition format
10-accessibility.md VoiceOver, text scaling, visual accommodations
11-command-nexus.md The command Nexus — every command and action: bindings, contexts, customizability
12-editions.md The three editions (Lanework / Pro / Teams): distribution, provider seam, feature matrix
13-native-undo.md macOS-native undo/redo — the base edition's history substrate

Deferred design iterations

The card window (05-card-window.md), toolbar (03-board-ui.md ▸ Toolbar), and styling controls (03-board-ui.md ▸ Styling ▸ Controls) each had their focused pass and are settled. The 2026-07-27 edition split (12-editions.md) added two deferred passes: the attachment-undo staging design and the EchoLedger foreign-undo bridge (both flagged in 13-native-undo.md), plus Teams' tracker integration (no design yet).

Wishlist

Ideas worth keeping but outside the committed design live in ../WISHLIST.md.

Terminology

The rewrite adopts lane as the canonical term for what the old app called a column (it's in the name: Lane-work). "Column" survives only when referring to the old app or to interior card-grid columns inside a wide lane.