termino

A local-first task board for the terminal. termino keeps projects, boards and tasks in a single SQLite file on your machine and gives you three ways in:

• a TUI Kanban board with live refresh,
• a CLI for scripting and quick edits,
• an MCP server (stdio) so AI agents such as Kiro can read and update the same board you are looking at.

No accounts, no network: the binary opens no ports and makes no outbound connections.

Install

Install script (Linux, macOS)

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lesquel/termino/main/install.sh | sh

The script downloads the release archive for your OS/architecture plus checksums.txt, verifies the SHA-256 and refuses to install on a mismatch.

Go

go install github.com/lesquel/termino/cmd/termino@latest

Requires Go 1.25+. No cgo is needed (modernc.org/sqlite is pure Go).

Release archives

Every release publishes termino___.tar.gz (.zip on Windows) for linux, darwin and windows on amd64 and arm64, and a checksums.txt with SHA-256 sums.

Quick start

termino setup                               # user name, first project, widget, agents
termino project new --name "Web app" --key WEB --associate-pwd
termino add "Fix login redirect" --priority high
termino                                     # open the board
termino widget install                      # status summary in bash/zsh prompt
termino connect kiro                        # register the MCP server in Kiro

Board keys

Moving a card into the last column (Done) plays a short celebration, unless motion is off or NO_COLOR is set. Columns over their WIP limit are flagged. The selected card is marked with >, so the selection stays visible without color. In the task detail, e edits; ctrl+s saves (enter also saves from the title field, and inserts a newline in the description).

Connecting an agent (Kiro)

termino connect kiro       # adds a "termino" entry to ~/.kiro/settings/mcp.json
                           # and writes .kiro/steering/termino.md in the current dir
termino disconnect kiro    # removes only what connect added

The entry runs termino mcp. Thirteen tools are exposed: read tools list_projects, get_board, list_tasks, get_task, my_tasks, and write tools create_task, update_task, move_task, assign_task, claim_task, complete_task, add_comment, delete_task. termino mcp --read-only exposes only the read tools; --actor sets the agent identity (default: the MCP client name).

CLI reference

Run termino --help for full flags.

Tasks are referenced as KEY-N, N / #N (current project) or by ID; columns, members and sprints by ID or case-insensitive name. Column names are unique per project, ignoring case.

The “current project” is the one associated with the working directory (project new --path / --associate-pwd, longest matching path wins); outside any associated directory it is the project last created or selected.

Configuration

termino follows the XDG base directory spec:

config.toml keys:

user_name = "ana"
current_project_id = ""
theme = "default"
motion = true        # false disables animations

Environment: NO_COLOR (any non-empty value) disables animations.

Architecture

Clean Architecture organised by feature. Each feature under internal/features// has domain, application, infrastructure and presentation layers, and dependencies always point at the domain.

cmd/termino            entry point
internal/cli           Cobra commands and dependency wiring
internal/app/tui       root Bubble Tea model (screens, live refresh)
internal/app/mcp       MCP server (mark3labs/mcp-go, stdio)
internal/features/     project, board, task, member, sprint, agent,
                       tasksource, connector, widget, setup
internal/platform/     config (XDG), sqlite (embedded migrations), logging,
                       events, sanitize (terminal-escape stripping)

The TUI polls SQLite PRAGMA data_version so changes made by agents or other processes appear without a restart. All text from tasks is stripped of escape sequences before it is drawn.

Development

make build             # ./bin/termino with version injected
make test              # go test ./...
make vet               # go vet ./...
make lint              # fails if gofmt -l reports files
make race              # go test -race ./... (needs cgo)
make bench             # latency benchmarks
make install           # go install with version ldflags
make release-snapshot  # goreleaser build into ./dist without publishing
make clean

Performance

make bench runs internal/bench against a temporary SQLite database seeded with 500 (widget) or 1,000 (board, MCP) tasks. Measured on an Intel i7-1255U, Linux, go test -bench:

TestWidgetSummaryP50WithinTarget fails the normal test run if the widget p50 exceeds 100 ms (skipped with -short and under -race). Process start-up is not included in the in-process numbers.

Agent evaluation

eval/prompts.md holds the PRD 6 evaluation set: 20 natural-language requests with the expected MCP calls and database-level pass criteria (target: 18/20). go test ./eval checks the set stays consistent with the server’s tool names and argument schemas; scoring an agent is a manual run described in the file.

Releases: pushing a v* tag runs .github/workflows/release.yml, which builds with GoReleaser and creates a draft GitHub release with archives and checksums.txt; publish the draft to make it visible to install.sh.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.