Project preview: Banco

For the last few months I’ve been working to a new project called Banco. Banco is a project management tool for the command line written in Go, built in a way that it enforces my own way of organizing projects’ resources like notes, tasks, bookmarks and documents. I will be writing more about this project in the next weeks, for now I will just paste the README here. Find it on github.com/claudiodangelis/banco.

Banco

Banco Management System, or simply Banco, is an opinionated project management tool for the command line that helps you organize notes, tasks, bookmarks and documents for your projects.

Banco objects (notes, tasks, bookmarks, etc) are stored in the filesystem, implemented as plain text files and folders within the root of the project, so you won’t need to install or run any database or server. This enables you to easily create archives and backups, move projects around the filesystem, use command line tools, or keep track of changes by using version control.

The name “Banco” is a tribute to Banco Del Mutuo Soccorso, the best italian progressive rock band of all times.

Installation

You can install Banco with Go:

go get github.com/claudiodangelis/banco

or by downloading the latest binary release.

Configuration

Banco needs almost no configuration to get started. You only need to make sure that the two following environment variables are set:

• $EDITOR
• $BROWSER

Banco will use the first to open plain text files (notes, tasks), and the second for the bookmarks.

Modules

Banco’s features are built as modules, there are modules available for management of:

• documents
• bookmarks
• notes
• tasks

and, soon, secrets.

A typical Banco project looks like this on the filesystem:

16:14:25 /tmp/banco-test
$ tree -QA
.
├── "bookmarks"
│   ├── "AWS"
│   │   └── "instances"
│   └── "github page"
├── "documents"
├── "notes"
│   ├── "My First Note"
│   └── "ideas"
│       ├── "discarded"
│       │   └── "code repositories"
│       └── "secrets management"
└── "tasks"
    ├── "backlog"
    │   └── "Write README"
    ├── "doing"
    │   └── "Take screenshots"
    └── "done"
        └── "Implement modules"

10 directories, 8 files

The above, in Banco, is rendered like this:

Root:

Notes:

Tasks:

Notes

Notes are just plain text files stored in the notes folder. If you set a label for the note, it will be implemented as a subfolder of the notes folder. When opening a note with banco, the $EDITOR value will be used to open the file.

Tasks

There are two ways to represent a task: a plain text file, or a folder of files. “Tasks” module has no concept of labels, instead it uses “statuses”. First-level subfolders will be considered statuses of the tasks. When you create a new task, you will be asked which one you want to create it into. By default, Banco creates backlog, doing, done. When opening a task with Banco, the $EDITOR value will be used to open the file (or the folder).

Bookmarks

Just like notes, bookmarks are plain text files whose content is an URL. You can group bookmarks by labels. When opening a bookmark with banco, the $BROWSER value will be used to open the URL.

Documents

Everything which cannot be organized as a note, task or bookmark is a document. When opening a document with Banco, the xdg-open program will be used to open the file.

Get started

After installing Banco, create an empty folder, enter it, then run banco init:

mkdir my-project
cd my-project
banco init

Banco will create the folder structure, and you will be ready to get started.

Command line interface

Banco uses a consistent command line interface. From the command line interface you can create, open, update, list and delete objects:

banco [command] [module]

For example:

• Create a new note

    banco new note
  

  You will be able to enter the title of the note and, optionally, a label. If the label doesn’t exist, you can create it from there:

  

• Update a task

    banco update task
  

  After choosing the task you want to update, you will be able to update its attributes:

  

Available commands:

Credits

Banco is created by Claudio d’Angelis.