Lanework

A native macOS kanban app whose boards are plain folders and Markdown files. Every board, lane, and card is a folder with an index.md (YAML frontmatter + Markdown body); the filesystem is the source of truth and the app is a live view over it.

The defining consequence: anything that can read and write files is a first-class user of a board — text editors, Finder, shell scripts, git, and above all AI agents. Lanework's job is to be the best human surface over that substrate.

Key features

Lanework is in early development. This list tracks what has actually shipped and grows milestone by milestone; the full design lives in DESIGN/.

• Storage contract, read side — frontmatter engine with a byte-perfect round-trip guarantee (unknown keys, comments, and formatting survive every rewrite; duplicate keys read last-wins; wrong-type scalars coerce read-side), gapped fractional ordering (Ranks), and a fail-fast board loader with UUID-gated level detection, warning-collecting skips, and tombstone-aware snapshots — pinned by a golden fixture suite of 18 on-disk boards.
• Storage contract, write side — BoardWriter turns every mutation into an atomic temp-file+rename over exactly the files it touches: creates mint lowercase-UUIDv4 identities and .kanban packages; moves keep the UUID (with per-folder collision repair at the cross-board import boundary); copies mint fresh identities at every level; deletes are in-place tombstones with position-perfect restore and physical purge; attachment imports never overwrite and never refuse (Finder-style renames). Every app write stamps modified, clears modified-by, and preserves everything it didn't change byte-for-byte; readable-but-uneditable frontmatter shapes refuse loudly instead of corrupting.
• Live store — every open board is one shared, watched, in-memory snapshot: an FSEvents folder watcher (debounced, .git-filtered, origin-reconciling) drives whole-tree reloads with a generation guard and single-flight coalescing; write brackets suppress self-echo; a file-identity-keyed store registry refcounts stores and watchers across windows and absorbs root renames via bookmark re-resolution (a vanished root locks the board and watches for its return); plus the board registry (recents, bookmarks, cached counts), the banner center's single precedence order, the dirty-buffer guard, and transient UI state.
• Window architecture — the three window types and their lifecycle: a welcome window (branding, failed-open reporting), one board window per root (per-board frame memory, repositioned onto a live screen), and at-most-one card window per card (last-used size, cascaded; follows its card across lanes; dismisses on delete, tombstone, or cross-board move). Closing a board window or quitting runs one strict close flush — card sessions end, pending work drains, the registry is stamped — before the store tears down; launch restores the boards whose open-now flags survived quit (or crash), a preference gating only whether the flags are consulted.
• The board — every lane always on screen, the window's width dividing across the lanes' width units with no horizontal scroll: cards flow into as many interior masonry columns as a lane is wide, a right-edge drag resizes between whole units by growing the window (snapping at the gap with release hysteresis, hard-stopping at the screen with rubber-band feedback), and ⌥⌘→/⌥⌘← re-divide the existing width instead. Lane chrome is a per-lane SF Symbol (unknown names fall back leniently), title or untitled placeholder, a card-count badge that counts exactly what's rendered, and a new-card button — the whole title bar doubling as the reorder drag surface, a plain click selecting the lane and movement carrying it above its siblings while they show the would-be order.
• Card faces — a card reads as a leading SF Symbol, its title (or a quiet untitled placeholder), and a quiet paperclip when it has attachments — title-only by design, no body excerpt. Colour is an edge accent rather than a fill: background paints a stripe down the card's left edge and iconColor tints the symbol, both written as a kebab-case palette name (12 icon tints, 12 backgrounds) or a #RRGGBB[AA] hex. Everything degrades rather than complains — an unreadable colour simply doesn't paint, and the value stays on disk exactly as written. Each card's snapshot carries its attachment names, listed flat and in Finder order (top-level files only; subfolders, hidden files, and symlinks are preserved but never surfaced).
• Creating and renaming — New Card (⌘N) files into the selected card's lane immediately after it, a selected lane's bottom, or the last-active lane, opening a focused pseudo-card that exists nowhere on disk until its title commits (Return commits and re-selects the lane, ⌘↩ also opens the card window, Escape or clicking away discards, and a failed create discards rather than waiting for a card that can't arrive). Inline rename — Return on a card, Board ▸ Rename for either kind — tracks its target by UUID, so a foreign move mid-edit is invisible and a tombstone or deletion discards the edit silently; committing empty removes the title key rather than writing a blank one. New Lane is ⇧⌘N. Every mutating command disables while an editor holds the keyboard and under the read-only lock.

Development

The Xcode project is generated — project.yml is the source of truth, not the .xcodeproj:

xcodegen generate
xcodebuild build -project Kanban.xcodeproj -scheme Kanban -destination 'platform=macOS'
xcodebuild test  -project Kanban.xcodeproj -scheme Kanban -destination 'platform=macOS,arch=arm64'

macOS 26+, Swift 6 (strict concurrency), SwiftUI, sandboxed. Internal codename Kanban (target, scheme, bundle id dev.rzen.indie.Kanban); the app ships under the display name Lanework.