Taskers

A Linux-first terminal workspace for agent-heavy work.
Top-level workspace windows, panes, tabs, an attention rail, and a local control CLI for notifications, browser automation, and debugging.

Install · Daily usage · Taskersctl guide · Notifications · Release checklist

Taskers gives agent-heavy terminal work a native workspace model: top-level windows that behave like a tiling canvas, panes inside each window, tabs inside each pane, and an attention rail for unread, waiting, error, and completed work. The local taskersctl CLI ties those surfaces together with notifications, agent-state inspection, browser automation, and debugging tools.

The active product lives at the repo root. Archived pre-cutover GTK/AppKit code is kept under taskers-old/ for reference only.

What it does

• Organizes large amounts of terminal work into workspace windows, panes, and tabs instead of one flat tab strip.
• Surfaces unread, waiting, error, and completed states through the attention rail so operators can triage quickly.
• Ships a local control CLI for notifications, browser snapshots, shell integration, and runtime debugging.

Documentation

• Daily usage
• Notifications and attention
• Taskersctl operator guide
• Release checklist

Install

Linux (x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu):

sudo apt-get install -y libgtk-4-dev libadwaita-1-dev libjavascriptcoregtk-6.0-dev libwebkitgtk-6.0-dev
cargo install taskers --locked
taskers

Arch Linux (AUR):

yay -S taskers-bin
# or
yay -S taskers-git

cargo install taskers installs the Linux launcher entrypoint. On first launch, that launcher ensures the version-matched Linux app bundle is present under the user data directory and then starts the bundled taskers-gtk host plus its helper binaries. The first launch also bootstraps the version-matched Ghostty runtime assets when needed.

taskers-bin installs the published Linux bundle under /opt/taskers that matches the current AUR package version. taskers-git builds the current dev branch into the same layout.

The Linux app requires GTK4/libadwaita plus the host WebKitGTK 6.0 development packages at install time and the WebKitGTK 6.0 runtime at launch time. Taskers handles terminal-session persistence itself on Linux through its internal terminal sidecar; if the sidecar is unavailable, Taskers falls back to fresh shells and warns that persistence is unavailable.

Mainline macOS support is currently not shipped from this repo root.

First 5 Minutes

Start Taskers:

taskers

Keep the workspace model straight:

• A workspace contains top-level workspace windows.
• A workspace window contains panes.
• A pane contains tabs.
• Scrolling/panning is a workspace-window concern. Splits and tabs stay local to the current window.

Open a terminal in Taskers and emit a test notification:

taskersctl notify --title "Taskers" --body "Hello from the current pane"

You should see:

• an unread badge in the sidebar
• a notification row in the attention rail
• a desktop banner unless the target is already visible and notification suppression is enabled

Try the built-in shell helpers from a Taskers terminal:

taskers_waiting "Need review"
taskers_done "Finished"
taskers_error "Build failed"

Open a browser pane from the pane controls, then inspect it from the same Taskers terminal:

taskersctl browser snapshot
taskersctl browser get title

Enable shell completions for taskersctl:

mkdir -p ~/.local/share/bash-completion/completions
taskersctl completion bash > ~/.local/share/bash-completion/completions/taskersctl

mkdir -p ~/.zsh/completions
taskersctl completion zsh > ~/.zsh/completions/_taskersctl

mkdir -p ~/.config/fish/completions
taskersctl completion fish > ~/.config/fish/completions/taskersctl.fish

Those generated scripts also complete live --workspace, --pane, and --surface ids when Taskers is running.

Develop

On Ubuntu 24.04, install the Linux UI dependencies first:

sudo apt-get install -y libgtk-4-dev libadwaita-1-dev libjavascriptcoregtk-6.0-dev libwebkitgtk-6.0-dev xvfb

Install the app into Cargo's bin directory:

cargo install --path crates/taskers-app --force

That installs the repo-local binaries directly into Cargo's bin directory:

• taskers
• taskers-gtk
• taskersctl
• taskers-terminald

For repo-local verification, prefer the directly installed GTK host:

taskers-gtk

If plain taskers still resolves to ~/.local/bin/taskers, that is the launcher-managed bundle path and can lag behind your repo build. Use taskers-gtk or the absolute Cargo bin path for feature testing unless you intentionally refreshed the launcher-managed release bundle too.

taskers-terminald is an internal helper binary used for persistent terminal sessions. You normally do not launch it by hand.

Run the headless baseline smoke:

TASKERS_TERMINAL_BACKEND=mock \
bash scripts/headless-smoke.sh \
  "$(command -v taskers-gtk)" \
  --smoke-script baseline \
  --diagnostic-log stderr \
  --quit-after-ms 5000

For publishing and release prep, use docs/release.md.