I made a terminal task manager, got featured by the creator of Textual, and Reddit banned me 🤣

kohei wada — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 04:54:23 +0000

Have you ever spent weeks building an open-source project, finally launched it, and then had Reddit's spam filter silently delete your post because your account was too new?

That was my experience launching taskdog.

But the Reddit drama isn't the point. The real story is why I built a terminal task manager from scratch.

The Problem: No task manager fit my workflow

I was inspired by Taskwarrior — powerful, keyboard-driven, terminal-native. But I wanted a proper TUI and a local API I could build on top of. Nothing out there quite fit, so I built my own.

The Design Decisions

Why no subtasks?

Most task managers let you nest tasks infinitely. I removed subtasks entirely. Dependencies + tags cover 99% of personal task organization, and keeping the structure flat makes the schedule optimizer dramatically simpler. I documented the full reasoning in DESIGN_PHILOSOPHY.md.

Why Clean Architecture for a personal tool?

The codebase is split into three packages: taskdog-core (business logic), taskdog-server (FastAPI REST API), taskdog-ui (CLI/TUI). Overkill for a personal project? Maybe. But it forced me to keep business logic completely independent of the UI and transport layer — and it paid off when I added the API server without touching the core.

What it does

Full-screen TUI powered by Textual
FastAPI + SQLite backend running locally
9 scheduling optimization algorithms
Time tracking with planned vs actual comparison
Gantt chart view
Task dependencies with circular detection

Try it instantly (no install needed)

docker run --rm -it ghcr.io/kohei-wada/taskdog:demo

Spins up the server and launches the TUI in one shot, with demo data preloaded.

The Reception

After shipping it, some nice things happened:

Featured on Terminal Trove
Featured on LinuxLinks in the CLI/TUI/Productivity category
Will McGugan — creator of Textual, the library powering the TUI — said: "The author of this project has clearly got a good eye for design in the terminal"

Note: Built with the help of Claude Code (credited as contributor in the repo). Architecture, algorithms, and all design decisions are my own.