🦣 Tusk

Tusk is a simple daily todo manager for your terminal. It stores all your daily tasks in a JSON file and make its easy to add, list, mark, edit and export (soon). I took heavy inspiration from Git and wanted a command > action style terminal interaction.

Installation

Due to Tusk being under development installation is a bit manual at the moment, however, I try to keep the main branch in a somewhat "releasable" state.

brew tap john-crossley/tap
brew install john-crossley/tap/tusk
tusk --version

Pro tip: alias tusk to a smaller command, for example t

For zsh:

printf "\nalias t='tusk'" >> ~/.zprofile

For bash:

printf "\nalias t='tusk'" >> ~/.bash_profile

Usable

I'm going to assume you've aliased tusk to t if not sorry, just imagine tusk wherever t is 😅.

t [OPTIONS] <COMMAND>

Global options

• --data-dir <DIR>: Override the base data directory.
• -o, --output: Outputs options "md"|"json"|"terminal", defaults to "terminal".
• --no-colour: Disable coloured output.
• --verbose: Enable verbose logging.

Commands

ls

List tasks for the day

t ls
t ls --tag work shopping
t ls -s day

Options

• -d, --date <YYYY-MM-DD>: The from date, can use yesterday, today, tomorrow. Defaults to current date.
• --tag <TAG>: Filter tasks by one or more tags.
• -s, --scope <SCOPE>: The scope of the tasks to be shown, can be day, focus or all. Defaults to day.

add

Add a new task

t add "Drink more water #tag1 #tag2"
t add "Eat more fruit and nuts" -p high -n

Options

• -d, --date <YYYY-MM-DD>: The from date, can use yesterday, today, tomorrow. Defaults to current date.
• -p, --priority <LEVEL>: Set priority (low, med, or high), defaults to low.
• -n, --notes: Attach notes (opens in your editor).

done

Mark a task as done by its index.

t done 3

undone

Mark a task as undone by its index.

t undone 3

rm

Remove a task by its index

t rm 3

edit

Edit a task’s text and or notes.

t edit 4 "Count 🐑 before sleeping"
t edit 4 -n
t edit 4 -p high|med|low

Options

• -d, --date <YYYY-MM-DD>: The from date, can use yesterday, today, tomorrow. Defaults to current date.
• -n, --notes: Attach or edit notes.

show

Show details of a single task.

t show 5

Displays the task, priority, tags, notes, and metadata in a nice formatted view.

Options

• -d, --date <YYYY-MM-DD>: The from date, can use yesterday, today, tomorrow. Defaults to current date.

migrate

Migrate tasks from one day to another, only migrates incomplete tasks.

t migrate --from yesterday
t migrate --from 2025-10-02 --to tomorrow

Options

• -f, --from <YYYY-MM-DD>: The from date, can use yesterday, today, tomorrow
• -t, --to <YYYY-MM-DD>: The to date, can use yesterday, today, tomorrow
• --dry-run: Output what will be migrated without actually performing the migration.

review

Review tasks from the last n days.

t review --days 10

Options

• --days n: The number of days to review (excludes current day).

Subcommands

• focus: For managing persistent focus tasks.

focus

For times when you need a long running task, you have the focus subcommand. focus tasks will exist separately from daily tasks, so will always be present, until deleted. It's also worth noting that focus only supports a subset of top level tusk commands. For now.

focus ls

List your long running focus tasks.

t focus ls

focus add

Add a long running focus task.

t focus add "Finish the PR to support focus tasks for Tusk 🦣"

focus done

Mark a long running task as done by its index.

t focus done 3

focus undone

Mark a long running task as undone by its index.

t focus undone 3

focus rm

Remove a long running task by its index

t focus rm 3

focus show

Show details of a single long running task.

t focus show 5

Examples

# Add a task with tags and priority
t add "Prepare slides for meeting #work !high"

# Mark it as done
t done 1

# Show details
t show 1

# List only work-related tasks
t ls --tag work

# End of the day and you still have incomplete actions.
t migrate --to tomorrow

# Review your items from the past 10 days
t review --days 10

Screenshots

Data storage

Tusk stores your todos as a single JSON file in a date based directory structure. Bt default, this lives under your systems app data dir, eg:

~/.local/share/tusk/vaults/default/2025/09/20.json

You will soon be able to organise todos into a different "vault" using the --vault <name> command.

What's next?

• Persistent tasks. For those long running tasks that span multiple days.
• Rich metadata parsing, at the moment it's not very exciting but.. It'll better support !priority, @time, #tags and >due.

Build from source 🦀

You’ll need Rust.

Clone the repository and build:

git clone https://github.com/john-crossley/tusk.git
cd tusk
cargo build --release

Your freshly baked 🍞 binary will be in: target/release/tusk

You can move it somewhere on your $PATH for easier use, for example:

cp target/release/tusk ~/.local/bin/

I'm not a Rust expert, you might find bugs, or the code might not be perfect. That's because it was all hand cranked. If you have any issues you'd like to report, please feel free.