Ranger

A personal task tracker inspired by Pivotal Tracker, built in Rust.

Ranger strips Pivotal Tracker down to its essentials: tasks, tags, and two lists. No projects, no user management, no role hierarchies — just a focused tool for tracking work.

Why Ranger

Pivotal Tracker does too much. Most of its features — story types, epics, multi-user workflows — serve teams, not individuals. Ranger keeps what matters for solo work and discards the rest.

Design

Tasks

Every item is a task. No stories, bugs, chores, or features — just tasks. Each task has:

Title and description
Comments for ongoing notes
Tags for grouping related work

Ranger has no subtasks and no dependency edges. Both were built and then removed as complexity that went unused, leaving a flat list ordered by priority. Break work down by creating separate tasks; record a dependency as a comment.

States

A task is always in one of four states:

State	Meaning
Icebox	Captured but not committed to
Ready	Committed and ordered by priority
In Progress	Actively being worked on
Done	Finished

Tags Instead of Projects

Tags replace projects. Filter any backlog by tag to see a focused slice of work. No rigid project boundaries, no duplication when a task spans concerns.

Interface

ranger serve starts a web server on port 3000 that renders a backlog as a board. Tasks in the ready and icebox columns drag to reorder; everything else is read-only for now. Design is minimalist, built with Utopia fluid responsive CSS.

Getting Started

Build and install:

cargo install --path .

Or run directly:

cargo run --bin ranger -- <command>

Quick start

ranger backlog create "my-project"
ranger task create "First thing to do" --backlog my-project
ranger task create "Second thing" --backlog my-project --state ready
ranger task list --backlog my-project
ranger tag add <key> urgent
ranger task edit <key> --state in_progress
ranger comment add <key> "Started working on this"
ranger task show <key>

Use --json on any command for machine-readable output. Backlogs are identified by name. Tasks are referenced by key prefix — type just enough characters to be unique.

Set RANGER_DEFAULT_BACKLOG to skip --backlog on every command.

The database lives at $XDG_DATA_HOME/ranger/ranger.db by default. Override with --db <path> or RANGER_DB env var.

For Claude Code

This repository doubles as a Claude Code plugin marketplace. Add it with /plugin marketplace add kejadlen/ranger, then install the ranger plugin to give an agent the skill that documents this workflow.

Architecture

Ranger is a single Rust crate with a library and binary target:

Library (ranger) — core data model, database operations, key generation
CLI (ranger binary) — clap-based binary for humans and AI agents
Webapp (ranger serve) — axum server in the same binary, serving the board

The CLI exists primarily so AI agents can manage tasks programmatically. The webapp exists for humans who prefer a visual interface.

Releases

Ranger's source of truth is a quire repository, which mirrors to Gitea (git.kejadlen.dev) and GitHub (github.com/kejadlen/ranger). Each push to main on GitHub triggers the CI workflow, which runs checks and, once it passes, tags the commit vYYYY-MM-DD+<short-sha>, builds macOS and Linux binaries, creates a GitHub release, and publishes Dotslash configuration.

The version format is calver: the date of the commit plus its short SHA (e.g., v2026-04-21+abc1234).

Roadmap

The first milestone is met: Ranger's own backlog lives in Ranger, and an agent works it while building the tool. The Claude Code plugin has shipped too.

Configurable board columns in the web UI
Auto-refreshing the board when data changes
Public read-only sharing with permissions
Browsing completed work