carmack

carmack

carmack is a daily progress tracker for teams, inspired by John Carmack's .plan files and based on git.

Daily notes and tasks are stored in plain .plan files, using a simple and grep-able format, divided into done, completed, canceled, and open entries.

carmack stores each user's (or teammate!) daily plan files in subfolders, so it's easy to see who did what on a given date.

Installation

go get github.com/ruggi/carmack

Usage

Adding entries

You can use the add command to add new entries.

Mark them as done, completed, or canceled tasks with the --done, --completed, or --canceled flags.

$ carmack add 'create PR for new feature'

$ carmack add --done 'merged feature branch'
$ carmack add --completed 'cleanup code'
$ carmack add --canceled 'weird feature'

Showing entries

You can use the show command to show entries from plan files. They can be filtered with the --done, --completed, --canceled, or --open flags.

By default it shows entries for your (current user's) plan files.

It's possible to use the --user [username] option to show entries for a specific user.

$ carmack show [-u username] [--done|--completed|--canceled|--open]

The nice thing about the plan files is that they're just plain text, so they can be directly grep-ed, modified, deleted, and used with other cli tools.

Listing plan files

You can use the list (alias: ls) command to get a list of your plan files.

$ carmack list

Git

The main benefit of using carmack for teams is that synchronization is done using git, with the ~/.carmack folder being a repository itself.

First, initialize the git repo:

$ carmack git init

Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/john/.carmack/.git/
[master (root-commit) c6f290d] initial commit
 1 file changed, 17 insertions(+)
 create mode 100755 john/2018-08-17.plan

Then, set up the remotes with your team's carmack repository:

$ carmack git remote add origin [email protected]:team/plan

Now you can sync your carmack folder with pull and push:

$ carmack git pull origin master
$ carmack git push -u origin master

Once the git repository is initialized, every time you add a new entry to your plan files it gets automatically added and committed to the repo:

$ carmack add -d 'closed issue'
[master 9a13e06] 'john: plan update 2018-08-17T22:02:40+02:00'
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)

$ carmack git pull
$ carmack git push

You can explicitly set a local git user.name config variable on the git repository so that your entries will be stored in a folder with that name:

$ carmack git config --local user.name '<your_name>'

Other git commands

carmack git is just a wrapper around git itself, so you can use any normal command with it (a-là pass).

For example:

$ carmack git log --oneline
6fa0ca9 (HEAD -> master) 'john: plan update 2018-08-17T22:02:40+02:00'
9a13e06 'bob: plan update 2018-08-17T21:05:37+02:00'
5b3de41 initial commit

Structure

All plan files are stored in the ~/.carmack/ directory (and git repo), and each user's own plan files are stored in the ~/.carmack/<user>/ folders.

~/.carmack
├── alice
│   ├── 2018-08-15.plan
│   └── 2018-08-17.plan
├── bob
│   ├── 2018-08-14.plan
│   ├── 2018-08-15.plan
│   ├── 2018-08-16.plan
│   └── 2018-08-17.plan
└── john
    ├── 2018-08-15.plan
    ├── 2018-08-16.plan
    └── 2018-08-17.plan

When a new entry is added, the corresponding plan file is created, if it doesn't exist, with the name YYYY-MM-DD.plan. The file name's date format is UTC-based.

User folder names

The folder where a user's plan files are stored is named as:

• the local (to the carmack repo) git user.name config value, or
• the global git user.name config value, or
• the current login username (as in $USER or whoami)

Plan format

As nicely written here, a plan file keeps track of daily work.

* merged PR
* answered that_guy on intercom
* deployed version 42

+ reviewed bob's feature branch

- meeting with that_guy

fix cloudformation
add more workers to the async stuff

The syntax is very simple:

When parsing and saving a plan file, carmack will adjust its content nicely, so that entries with the same prefix are grouped together.