Taskers

Taskers is a Linux-first terminal workspace for agent-heavy work. It combines:

• top-level workspace windows that behave like a tiling canvas
• panes inside each window
• tabs inside each pane
• an attention rail for unread, waiting, error, and completed work
• a local control CLI for notifications, agent state, browser automation, and debugging
• the ability to next more terminals then you'll ever know what to do with!

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

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

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.

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

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.