Notes, documents and tasks that stay yours: plain Markdown on your
own disk, for Windows and macOS.
Not a to-do list you empty — a record of
what you worked out, searchable years later, with an MCP door for your
assistant.
No accounts. No subscriptions. No telemetry. No
server.
English · Español
Prefer a direct download? GitHub Releases carries the signed installers — Windows (.exe) · macOS (.dmg)
Tisty is Opensource. Read it, build it, run it, or take one of the stable releases already out there. Nothing is hidden and all of it can be audited.
It is not a to-do app as you know it. A list gets emptied and forgotten. Here what you close stays: what you did, when, and what you worked out on the way. Months later you search for how you solved something and it is there — the description, the journal, the steps, the documents you leaned on.
I am not a company. I am a developer who kept solving the same problem twice, so I built the notes, documents and task manager I wanted and gave it away. It is meant to stay small and useful, not to grow a thousand features nobody uses. No ads, no telemetry, no accounts, no subscriptions — a local-first productivity tool that lives on your machine and nowhere else.
Why people choose Tisty over other task managers:
- 100% local — your tasks, your journal and your documents never leave your computer. No cloud, no server, no account. If you sync two machines, you can ask Tisty to leave the largest attachments in that shared folder instead of carrying them onto every disk; it never does that unless you choose it.
- Truly free — no premium tier, no feature gates, no trial. AGPL v3, and commercial terms only for organisations that cannot comply with it.
- Your data outlives the app — plain text and Markdown on your own disk,
readable with
catand searchable withgrep. - Finishing keeps everything — completing a task moves it to the archive with its steps, its notes and its attachments intact, documents included.
- Fast and native — a Rust core inside a Tauri window: it starts quickly, stays small, and looks like it belongs on both systems.
I use Tisty every day on macOS and Windows. If something feels off, open an issue — this project keeps improving because of real-world use.
It is for one person, by design. No assignees, no permissions, no boards. If you need to run a team, Tisty will not carry that.
- Why I Built This
- What It Is / What It Isn't
- What Makes It Different
- Who Is This For?
- The Idea It Is Built On
- Getting Started
- What It Does
- Your Data and Privacy
- Two Machines, If You Have Two
- A Command Line, If You Want One
- An Assistant, If You Use One
- Where It Stands
- What It Will Never Do
- Other Tools by the Same Author
- Standing On
- Contributing
- Licence
Organising your day is harder than a list makes it look. There are more moving parts than fit in your head, plans shift under you, and something you thought was small turns out not to be. Which is why finishing it feels good.
But look at what the task gathered on the way. The steps it actually took. The notes you wrote while working it out. What you looked up, what it turned out to connect to, the documents you leaned on. That is where the effort went.
Mine looked like "fix the intermittent timeouts on save". By the time it was done it had collected the ticket, the commit, and two paragraphs explaining that the real cause was a missing index on a table nobody was looking at.
Eight months later the same thing happened somewhere else. I remembered solving it. I could not remember how — and the note that held the answer had gone with the tick.
That is the whole reason Tisty exists. A task is not a line you cross out. It is a tree: the steps, the journal, the files and the documents that grew around it while you worked. Finishing it should not prune it.
I wanted it to stay mine, too. On my disk, in files I can open without asking anyone. So I built the thing I wanted, used it until it stopped annoying me, and put it here in case it is the thing you wanted too.
It is a personal task manager where finishing something is the beginning of its useful life. Tasks carry a description, a journal, steps and attachments; when you complete one it moves to the archive, and search reaches all of it, documents included.
It is for one person. No assignees, no permissions, no boards. If you need to run a team, Tisty will not carry that, and you deserve to know before you install it rather than after.
It is not something I sell. Nothing is locked, nothing expires, and there is no version of this with more in it. It is a program I wrote for myself and gave away.
Your data is files. Plain text on your own disk, readable with cat and
searchable with grep. If Tisty disappeared tomorrow, everything you wrote
would still be there and still make sense.
If you are looking for a free, open-source, offline task manager with no account, no subscription and no AI, this is what Tisty is:
| Your tasks live | in plain files on your own disk |
| Account | none, ever |
| Subscription | none. There is no paid tier and no upgrade |
| Offline | always. There is no server to be away from |
| AI inside | none, and none is coming |
| Your own assistant | yes, over MCP, if you choose to open the door |
| Priorities | the Eisenhower matrix, by its name |
| Sorting | lists, tags, steps and a journal on every task |
| Documents | written and searched beside the tasks, not in another app |
| Attachments | kept with the task, as themselves |
| Finished work | an archive that keeps what each task taught you |
| Two machines | through a folder you already sync. No server of ours |
| Natural language | dates, deadlines and repeats, parsed on your machine |
| Source | open, auditable, yours to fork |
The Eisenhower matrix, not numbered priorities. A task is urgent, important, both or neither — do, decide, delegate, drop. That names the decision instead of hiding it behind a number, and it is the difference between a list that sorts and a list that helps you choose. Around it: lists for where work belongs, tags for what cuts across, steps for the parts, and a journal for what you learn on the way.
Finishing is where it starts. Most task managers treat a completed task as rubbish to hide. Here it moves to an archive read in three layers: the ones that taught something come with their whole trail — what changed, when, and what you wrote — the routines come with their tallies and their streaks, and the rest is the trace. Search reaches all of it, documents included. A year in, that archive is the part you would miss.
Your assistant, not one of ours. Tisty has no AI in it. The natural language that turns "call the bank at 3" into a task is rules running on your machine, no model and no cloud. But it speaks MCP, so an assistant you already use can file work into it — with its steps, its date and the list it belongs in, on this machine, with no account and nothing over the network. You open that door, and you can close it.
Two machines, no middleman. If you already sync a folder, Tisty travels through it. There is no server of ours in between, nothing to sign up for, and nothing that stops working the day a company changes its mind.
Free is not a tier here. There is no upgrade, no seat count, no feature held back for later. The reason is not generosity: a program that keeps your work on your disk and never phones home has almost nothing to charge for, and asking would make it worse.
Someone who works alone, or mostly alone, and whose tasks leave a trail worth keeping. Developers, sysadmins, freelancers, researchers, students — anyone who has ever solved the same problem twice and known it the second time.
If what you want is a list to cross out and never open again, Tisty will feel like more than you asked for. That is a fair reason to walk away.
A completed task is not finished. It is archived.
It stops being a reminder of what to do and becomes the record of how something got solved. Three things follow from that, and they shaped everything else:
- Search is the main way into the archive, not a side feature.
- Deleting is the exception. The normal ending is completing, which keeps it. Erasing something for good takes two deliberate steps first: it has to be archived, and then hidden.
- Capture has to stay instant, because most tasks are not like that at all. The call you have to make tomorrow is born and dies within a day and leaves nothing worth keeping — and writing it down must not cost more than one line.
Windows — from the Microsoft Store, which keeps it updated for you.
macOS — with Homebrew. The tap is added once and never again. After that Tisty keeps itself up to date, so Homebrew stands aside:
$ brew tap rgdevment/tap
$ brew install --cask tistyOr take the disk image and the installer straight from Releases, on either system.
The first time it opens, Tisty asks two things — which language, and where your copies should go — and then writes you a guide and opens it. Everything else it decides for you and lets you change later: it starts with the computer and waits out of the way, because those were questions with an obvious answer. The guide is a document in your own store, in a folder of its own: yours to read, edit, or throw away like anything else you wrote.
Settings answers four questions rather than wearing five labels. General is how Tisty behaves towards you — language, start-up, the quick capture, notices, updates, and the two things that happen outside the window: the command line and the welcome. Your data is everything that touches your files, with syncing as a block of its own because it has a state, a warning that depends on who keeps your folder, and four actions. Assistants and Maintenance are what they say.
Three columns at most: what you are looking at, the list, and the task you opened. Nothing else on screen.
The list stands where it stands. It does not drift to the middle of whatever room is left, so opening a task moves nothing. Where the window is wide enough, the space that opens up is not left blank: a column tells you the day — what is overdue, what is for today, what is ahead, the four quadrants with their counts, the lists holding something and the tags in use. All of it counts your whole store rather than the slice on screen, and every figure is a way in. Narrow the window and it steps aside; a task always wins the room over it.
It reads what you write. You type a sentence and Tisty takes the date out of it, leaves the sentence readable, and shows you what it understood before anything is saved — as chips you can correct with one click.
"ship the release tomorrow at 10" → tomorrow 10:00
"file the report before friday" → due fri
"book the flights @travel #urgent" → @travel · #urgent
A day, a time, or both. Names, distances, plain dates. What it cannot read it leaves alone rather than guess. A deadline is a different thing from a plan, and three words open one: before, due, until.
A task opens beside the list, not on top of it: dates, list, tags, priority, a description and a journal in Markdown, steps you tick one at a time, and whatever you dropped on it. Completing it puts none of that out of reach. Opened to the whole page it gains a column of its own trail — how long it has been open, how much of it is done, and every change it has been through, which until now sat at the bottom where nobody scrolled.
Priorities are a matrix, not a ladder. Tisty borrows the four quadrants of the Eisenhower matrix — the method President Dwight D. Eisenhower is credited with, popularised by Stephen Covey in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: sort what you have by urgent against important, and each quadrant tells you what to do with it. Do what is urgent and important, Schedule what matters and is not urgent, Delegate what is urgent and is not yours, and leave in Minor whatever you could live without — when you are sure, one button drops the lot.
Drag a task into its quadrant, or type it: !do, !schedule, !delegate.
!decide still works, because it is what the quadrant used to be called. Each
quadrant has a + that opens the quick capture with that quadrant already
set, and whatever nobody has placed waits in a tray that opens the way you
left it.
Documents live beside the tasks, for reference material that has no date and never gets ticked. They are Markdown files you edit as documents — tables, checklists, code, images — and search reads them too. A task can point at a document; a document never creates tasks.
A document takes tags the way a task does — you write #contract in the
middle of a sentence and the document is filed under it. The tag lives in the
sentence rather than in a hidden header, so carrying the file to another editor
carries the tag with it. Tags is where they meet: one screen, the tasks under a
tag and the documents beneath them, and pressing a tag inside a document opens
exactly that. Accents come off and case is folded, so #camion and #camión
are one word however you typed them that day. A bare number is not a tag —
#1234 is the ticket somebody wrote down, not a subject — and neither is a
single letter: two characters, one of them a letter.
Text can be highlighted in a few colours and set apart as an aside — a plain
quote, or a callout GitHub reads too, written as > [!WARNING]. Tables keep how
their columns lean and how wide you drew them, and a code block says what
language it is and is coloured for it, with its lines numbered beside the text
rather than in it, so copying takes the code and nothing else. A block can carry
a name; one whose language is mermaid draws the diagram it describes
underneath — redrawn when you turn the light on or off — and one that says
math sets the formula it holds.
A web link on a line of its own is drawn as a card, made from the address itself — the site's name and the words you wrote. Nothing is fetched to draw it. Press Bring the preview and Tisty asks that page once for its title, its description and the picture it offers, keeps the answer here so it never asks again, and reads no more of it than it needs: a page cannot decide how much of your machine it takes.
It stays Markdown, and that is the point rather than a detail: everything above is syntax another reader already understands, so the file survives without Tisty — a block's name is what Markdown keeps after the language, and a column's width rides in how long its rule is drawn, which every other reader ignores and draws the same. Where Markdown genuinely cannot say a thing — an icon in a line of text — Tisty writes the small piece of HTML that can, and reads it back. Where the editor meets a shape it is known not to keep — front matter, footnotes, links written by reference, blocks of HTML — it says so and opens the document read-only rather than quietly destroying it. That list is what it checks, not a promise about everything a Markdown file can hold.
The writing sits on a lit page, and the first line with words in it is both the
name of the document and its title — reading past a fence or an alert's marker to
find it. When the window is wide enough a column opens beside it
with what the document is, the formatting the / menu used to hide, and its
outline. Tisty makes its own PDF — A4, Letter or one endless sheet, with its
own margins and the attachments carried inside — and shows it to you before you
export it.
A global shortcut opens a small field over whatever you are doing, so a task that occurs to you mid-something does not cost you the something.
Repeating tasks come back one occurrence at a time, so the archive shows you did it twelve times — and it counts what was owed rather than only what you closed, so a routine reads 26 of 30 with four dates that have no record. Marking one days late offers those dates back instead of calling them forgotten: tick the ones you did and the gap closes. Reminders arrive as a system notification and a short sound you can turn off. The whole window works from the keyboard.
The archive is read in three layers. The ones that taught something come with their whole trail — what changed, when, and what you wrote along the way. The routines come with their tallies, their streaks and the hour you usually keep them. The rest is the trace: what left nothing written, listed dense and out of the way, because it still happened and search still reaches it.
Everything lives in one folder on your disk: an append-only log of what
happened, your documents as .md files, and your attachments as themselves.
Nothing is obfuscated and nothing is in a format only Tisty can read.
Nothing is encrypted at rest, and that is a decision rather than an oversight — your operating system's permissions are the protection, and the files stay readable with tools you already have. It is written out in PRIVACY.md and SECURITY.md, including the parts that are not reassuring.
Tisty makes one network request unasked — when it opens, and once a day after that: it checks whether a newer version exists. It sends nothing. If one does exist and you press the button that offers it, two more follow — the file naming the release, and the installer — and Tisty refuses to install anything not signed with a key compiled into the copy you already have.
Tell Tisty where to leave the copies. It offers Google Drive, OneDrive, iCloud and Dropbox — whichever it finds installed, folder already worked out — or any other folder both computers reach, a NAS, a drive you plug in on Fridays. The rest it does on its own.
There is nothing of mine in the middle: no account, no server, no daemon. Who runs that folder is your business, not Tisty's. If you sync nothing, it never opens a connection at all.
Two machines can genuinely write the same document at once, and there Tisty merges them block by block — you edit the introduction on one, someone edits the closing paragraph on the other, and both land with nothing to answer. Only a real overlap becomes a question.
Or back up by hand. One zip, kept wherever you like.
Where the big ones live is yours to say. By default every machine carries every attachment, which is why any of them can open anything with the network off. Settings offers two other ways: keep only what this machine attached and fetch the rest when you open it, or — above 50 MB — leave them in the shared folder and nowhere else. That last one trades the copy on your disk for the space it took: the file is there when your provider or your NAS is, and Tisty says so plainly when it is not. A copy is only ever let go of after the one in the shared folder is found to hash the same.
And because what uploads that folder is your provider's program and not Tisty, if you ever change something on one machine and it does not turn up on the other, FAQ.md lists the causes worth checking, in order.
The window is the main way in. But everything it does, the terminal does too: the same store, the same tasks, the same natural language. It exists because I wanted it, and it is entirely optional.
$ tisty "call the bank at 3"
$ tisty ls today
$ tisty done 2Settings puts it within reach of your terminal, or you can install only the
command with brew install rgdevment/tap/tisty-cli and never open the window.
Tisty is not AI and has none inside. The natural language that turns "call the bank at 3" into a task is rules running on your machine: no model, no request, no cloud. That is not going to change.
But if you already use an assistant, you are probably telling it things worth keeping — the school group says card stock on Monday, the invoice is due on the 30th. So Tisty leaves a door, and you decide whether to use it.
Settings › Agents lists the assistants already installed on this computer and connects the one you pick: it writes a single line into that assistant's own settings, leaves the rest of that file where it was, and keeps a copy of it as it was before. For one it does not know, a line does it:
$ <your-assistant> mcp add tisty -- tisty mcpWhere <your-assistant> is whatever yours is called. It speaks
MCP on the same machine: no
account, no token, nothing over the network. You are the one who opens it.
The assistant appears in Settings › Agents as a device you have to let in, and
it stays a device you can throw out; until you do let it in, everything it
tries is refused.
What it may do is deliberately small: file a task with its steps and its date, add to the journal, write a document, add to the end of one that is already there, correct a passage of one, write one again whole, file documents into folders, keep a copy of a file you point it at — on a task or inside a document, which takes the larger file of the two — and read what is already there. What it may not do: close a task or delete one, delete a document, rename or empty a folder, reach a task you folded away, take files from outside the folders where a download lands, or file the same thing twice. To correct a passage it has to name it exactly as you wrote it, and if that text is not there or is there twice, nothing is written at all. To write a whole body again it has to send back the print the document read at when it last looked: if you have written in it since, the write is refused and it has to read again, so what you typed while it was thinking cannot be lost. A document you archived it can still read, and it is told that you archived it.
Whatever it reads travels wherever that assistant travels. That is between you and it — which is precisely why this is a door you open, and not one that was already open.
| ✅ | Tasks, lists, tags, steps, journal, attachments, search |
| ✅ | Tags in documents too, written into the sentence and read from it |
| ✅ | An archive read in three layers, with what each task left behind |
| ✅ | Natural language for dates, deadlines and repeats |
| ✅ | The window, the tray, and quick capture on a global shortcut |
| ✅ | Documents: editor, folders, and sync that merges block by block |
| ✅ | An assistant can file for you, over MCP, if you let it in |
| ✅ | Reminders, backup, and sync through a folder both machines reach |
| ✅ | A guided welcome, a guide written into your store, English and Spanish |
| ✅ | Folders and documents reordered by hand, carried to where you want them |
| ✅ | Icons: 1,381 drawings and 1,609 emoji, searchable in your own language |
| ✅ | macOS: signed and notarised. Windows: signed installer |
One thing is known and accepted rather than pending: nothing has been tested with a real screen reader, though the keyboard path has.
Reordering by hand used to be on this list, refused for a good reason: HTML drag and drop does not survive the native file drop that attachments need. It is here now because the tree stopped asking the browser and follows the pointer itself, which costs a little code and keeps both.
As important as the list above. Permanently out of scope: real-time collaboration, kanban boards, Gantt charts, time tracking, productivity metrics, databases with typed properties and formulas, and AI anywhere in the critical path.
The natural language stays deterministic and local, and Tisty never sends anything to a model — not a task, not a word. If you open the door in the section above, whatever your assistant reads travels wherever that assistant travels: Tisty still sends nothing, the assistant is the one carrying, and you are the one who let it in.
Same idea, same terms: free, open source, no ads, no telemetry, everything local.
- CopyPaste — a clipboard manager for Windows, macOS and Linux.
- LinkUnbound — a browser selector for Windows and macOS: it asks which browser should open a link instead of assuming.
Tisty is small because other people's work does the heavy lifting.
The core, in Rust — Tauri puts a native window around it without shipping a browser; serde reads and writes every line of the log; jiff does the dates and the time zones, which is the part nobody should write twice; SQLite, through rusqlite, holds the read cache; clap is the command line; ULID gives every task an identifier that sorts by time and needs no coordination.
The window — React draws it and Tailwind CSS styles it; TipTap and ProseMirror are the document editor; markdown-it renders the prose everywhere else; Mermaid draws the diagrams a code block describes and KaTeX sets its formulas; lowlight and highlight.js colour the code; react-pdf makes the PDF; Vite builds it and Vitest tests it.
The full list, with versions and licences, is in Cargo.lock and
app/package-lock.json.
How the store, the merge and the sync actually work is written down in ARCHITECTURE.md — a reference for the behaviour, not a tour of the code.
Read CONTRIBUTING.md. Open an issue before writing code for anything beyond a fix: Tisty is deliberately minimal, and a well-written feature can still be declined — usually because it would make the tool something other than what it is.
AGPL-3.0, and available under commercial terms for organisations that cannot comply with it.
The signed builds in the app stores carry their own terms, because the stores' do not accept the AGPL — DISTRIBUTION.md says which applies to what you have, and why. Nothing is withheld from the source either way.