Kanban, But Make It Fizzy

If you've ever set up a digital Kanban board, you know the drill: you create columns, you add cards, you drag things around. It works, but it often feels heavy. It feels like software designed for process managers, not for the actual flow of getting things done. What if a Kanban board was just a simple, fast, text file you could edit anywhere?

That's the itch that Basecamp's new project, Fizzy, is trying to scratch. It’s a fresh take on the Kanban board that throws out the complex UI and database backends in favor of something beautifully simple and developer-friendly.

What It Does

Fizzy is a local, terminal-based Kanban board. Instead of a web app with buttons and forms, your board is a plain text file (a Markdown file, to be precise). You edit the board by editing the file, and Fizzy renders it as a clean, column-based view right in your terminal. Move a task by moving a line of text. It’s version control friendly, portable, and instantly understandable.

Why It's Cool

The cleverness here is in the constraints. By using a Markdown file as the data store, Fizzy gets a lot for free:

• Zero Lock-in: Your board is just a file. You can edit it with Vim, VS Code, or even cat it out. No proprietary format.
• Git-Friendly: Since it's a text file, tracking your project's workflow history becomes a natural side effect of your commits. You can see how your board evolved over time.
• Blazing Fast: There's no UI to load, no network latency. It's just your terminal rendering a file. It feels instantaneous.
• Always Available: Need to check your priorities from a SSH session on a server? Just run fizzy. No login, no internet required.

It takes the core idea of Kanban—visualizing your work in columns—and strips it back to its absolute essence. It’s Kanban for people who live in the terminal and think in plain text.

How to Try It

The project is up on GitHub. Since it's a Ruby gem, getting started is straightforward.

First, install the gem:

gem install fizzy

Then, navigate to a project directory and create your board file. Fizzy expects a file named board.md. You can start with their template:

fizzy new

This creates a board.md file with some example columns (Backlog, Doing, Done). Open that file in your editor, add tasks as list items (- Task name), and save. Then, just run:

fizzy

Your Kanban board will render in the terminal. To update it, you just edit and save the board.md file. That's the whole loop.

Final Thoughts

Fizzy won't replace Jira or Linear for large, cross-functional teams that need complex features. And that's not the point. It’s a perfect, focused tool for individual developers or small teams who want a dead-simple way to track their own work without any ceremony.

It’s the kind of tool that makes you wonder why more things aren't this simple. If you appreciate the philosophy of tools like make or plain text productivity, Fizzy is definitely worth a few minutes of your time to set up. It might just become the lightweight task manager you didn't know you needed.

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