Hexfield Deck is for Kanban lovers and Markdown believers

Hi, I'm Henri. This is my first article here, and it's about almost everything I'm passionate about right away. Triggered by a bored Google search...

I love Kanban and I love Markdown. My tasks live in Markdown because Markdown is text. Plain, beautiful text. I can open it anywhere. Search it. Git it. Vim it. Grep it. Throw it on a server. Open it ten years from now and still understand what the hell I was thinking.

But Kanban? Kanban was always chained to the ideas and philosophy of designers and product owners. They want WYSIWYG and expensive backends with extensive options. But Kanban is just columns and cards. Nothing more.

Yet, grabbing a card and throwing it from TO DO into DONE still gives me the tiny dopamine hit our ancestors once got from bringing down a mammoth.

Today those worlds collided through a fortunate Google search: I found Hexfield Deck and, oh boy, Markdown finally gets a board!

The best of two worlds

Hexfield Deck takes a Markdown planner and turns it into an interactive Kanban board inside VS Code.

Three columns. To Do. In Progress. Done. Drag a card and my Markdown changes. Edit the Markdown and the board changes. The Markdown file remains the source of truth. The board is a view of it.

Hexfield Deck doesn’t lock my precious little tasks inside some proprietary productivity mausoleum with an Export button buried under Settings → Account → Data → Please not another submenu. It stays just a .md file. Praise be.

And because apparently somebody behind this thing (Jim Lindblom) understands how people actually work, clicking a card can jump straight back to its source line. Dragging cards between columns changes their checkbox state. Dragging between swimlanes moves the task to another Markdown section. And of course changes sync live.

I myself was baffled that it took 20 years for someone to pull that simple trick. It's everything I need to stay productive and undistracted (and I too live with the ADHD, my friends).

The GUI and the text are the same thing

A Hexfield task can look like this:

- [/] Ship parser v1 #hexfield [2026-02-10] !!! est:4h // nearly there
  - [/] Write frontmatter tests
  - [x] Wire up barrel exports
  - [ ] Final review

I can read that. You can read that. A computer can read that. Everybody wins.

The syntax is tiny:

- [ ] To do
- [/] In progress
- [x] Done
- [-] Won't do
- [!] Blocked

Then sprinkle in metadata:

#project
[2026-02-15]
!!!
est:2h
// a comment

Three bangs mean high priority. Two mean medium. One means low. est:2h means exactly what you think it means. Dates are dates. Hashtags are projects.

// gives you a comment without stuffing that comment into the visible card title. You can just type and forget about a trackpad or mouse.

And yes, you can combine the whole circus on one line. No JSON object containing twelve properties. No database schema. No little modal asking me to select “Priority: High” from a dropdown. When I'm thinking about priorities while typing I can just type !!!. Done. Beautiful.

Hexfield artfully steals the best of Markdown and puts it to work

Headings actually do something useful. H1 becomes a Slate. An H2 becomes a Row.

# Week 38

## Monday

- [ ] Fix website #snackandplay
- [/] Write article #writing

## Tuesday

- [ ] Question life choices #admin

# Backlog

## Soon

- [ ] Build tiny shell tool #cli

Now you have separate Slates like Week 38 and Backlog, while the H2 sections can become swimlanes. You then can use the Slates for weeks, categories or projects. Or separate them by swimlanes. The point is: you decide.

That’s smart because the structure lives in the document itself. There isn’t another configuration layer hovering above your file like an anxious middle manager.

My mouse mostly rides the bench

I have a thing about controlling interfaces by keystrokes. I use Vim. I use a Vim extension in VS Code. I even use Vim in Chrome via Vimium.

Because once your fingers learn how to move through text, the idea of repeatedly taking one hand off the keyboard, hunting down a pointer and carefully piloting it toward a 14-pixel button starts to feel faintly ridiculous.

I want the computer to move as fast as the thought. My brain says "Task". My fingers are already there: - [ ]. My brain says in progress: /. My brain says high priority: !!!. Let's move on with actually solving it.

I like to work at the speed of my mind, not my fading muscles. And yet I live with a huge contradiction: I also like Kanban.

Sometimes the visual board is simply better. I want to see the mess. I want to throw tasks around. I want the bird’s-eye view. Hexfield lets me have both.

Keyboard when text is faster. Board when visual reference is faster. Still the same file.

And if you grab the mouse anyways?

Want plain three-column Kanban? You’ve got it. Want swimlanes? You’ve got those too. Want to filter by project, priority, due date, status or estimate? Yep. Sort by priority, project, estimate or file order? Yep. Subtasks? Clickable. Quick-add? Yes, sir.

Right-click a card and change its title, date, estimate, priority, status or location without going back into the source.

Don't forget about Hexfield Text

There’s also a companion VS Code extension called Hexfield Text. Install it and your planner syntax gets its own visual language right inside the editor: project tags get colored, priorities stand out, time estimates get their own treatment, in-progress checkboxes become visible at a glance, and due dates change color depending on how close you are to the next night shift.

So this:

- [/] Finish article #writing [2026-09-20] !!! est:1h

is actually easy to read (you have to believe me here, because hexfield syntax is not shown on this website, obviously). Now the source is also carrying some of the visual information from the board.

Better still, Hexfield Text activates specifically for Hexfield planner files identified by type: hexfield-planner in their frontmatter. It's separated from other Markdown files and your README doesn’t suddenly light up like Times Square because somewhere in it you wrote !!!. It knows when to shut up.

Plain text has one hell of a warranty

Seriously. Planned obsolescence has long reached software, with ridiculous update schedules and support periods shorter than the average modern attention span.

Apps disappear. Services shut down. File formats get abandoned. Some company gets acquired and six months later your favorite tool has a new logo, an AI sidebar and a subscription. But plain text does not care.

If Hexfield Deck vanished tomorrow, my tasks would still exist. They’re Markdown. Maybe the pretty board disappears, but I still own my markdown. And maybe some weird text editor written in Rust in the year 2047 will adopt it. That was always the best feature for me.

We’ve somehow reached a point where “you still own a perfectly usable file if the software goes away” feels almost rebellious. Hexfield Deck gets that part right.

Hexfield Deck on GitHub

At the time of writing it’s still an early project — the README lists version 0.7.0, with things like fuller Obsidian support and week navigation still ahead.

So yes. Early days. Bugs may lurk. Whatever. I’m all in.

Kanban lovers: look at this thing. Markdown believers: look at this thing.

Hexfield isn't a Markdown gimmick. It's an actual no BS task system. And I'm not going back to Jira (at least for my private stuff).

jimblom / Hexfield-Deck

Hexfield Deck is a markdown-powered task board for VS Code and Obsidian. Parse your markdown files into an interactive kanban board. Drag cards across columns, set due dates, apply tags, and manage your workflow without ever leaving your editor. Your notes, your board, your deck.

Hexfield Deck

Markdown-powered kanban task board for VS Code and Obsidian

Hexfield Deck transforms your markdown weekly planner files into interactive kanban boards. Write tasks in plain text with inline metadata, then visualize and manage them on a drag-and-drop board — all without ever leaving your editor.

Swimlane View	Standard View

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✨ Features

Current (v0.7.0)

• ✅ 3-column kanban board (To Do / In Progress / Done)
• ✅ Slates & Rows — H1 headings define named Slates; every H2 is a swimlane Row
• ✅ Per-Slate navigation — Header dropdown switches between H1 Slates; each Slate has Standard and Swimlane views
• ✅ Five task statuses — [ ] To Do, [/] In Progress, [x] Done, [-] Won't Do, [!] Blocked
• ✅ // comment syntax — Annotate headings (## Monday // Feb 9) and tasks (- [ ] Fix bug // waiting on Joel) without affecting display or metadata…

View on GitHub