ike

The Eisenhower matrix, in your terminal.

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A task manager that sorts work by urgency against importance, into four quadrants — the method popularized by the president whose campaign-era nickname it borrows. What makes it unusual is that an agent can work with it in both directions:

• An agent can manage your matrix. ike mcp serves the Model Context Protocol, so Claude Code or any MCP client can capture, complete, and reprioritise tasks while you work. Off until you allow it.
• You can hand a task to an agent. ike plan 3 drafts a plan you read and argue with; ike delegate 3 carries it out in the task's own directory and streams what it does. Also off until you allow it — separately.

One Go binary, three ways in (TUI, CLI, MCP), over a single JSON file that is yours: mode 0600, on your disk, no account and no server. All three can run at once without losing writes.

Install

brew install jonascript/tap/ike

Or with Go 1.25+:

go install github.com/jonascript/ike@latest

Linux and macOS, Intel and Apple silicon. Prebuilt archives are attached to every release — they are not code-signed, so verify what you download:

shasum -a 256 -c checksums.txt --ignore-missing
gh attestation verify ike_0.2.0_darwin_arm64.tar.gz --repo jonascript/ike

That second command checks ike's published build provenance, which proves the archive was built by this repository's release workflow from the tag it claims.

Quickstart

ike add "Fix prod bug" -q 1        # quadrant 1: urgent and important
ike add "Write the release notes"  # defaults to quadrant 2
ike                                # open the matrix

	Urgent	Not urgent
Important	1 · Do It First	2 · Schedule It
Not important	3 · Delegate It	4 · Consider Eliminating It

Those headings are defaults, not fixed — rename any of them with t in the TUI or ike label. The quadrant numbers never change, so scripts and the MCP tools keep working whatever you call them.

TUI

Run ike with no arguments.

Key	Action
1–4, tab / shift+tab	focus quadrant
j/k or ↑/↓	select task
J/K or shift+↑/shift+↓	move task down/up within its quadrant
a	add task to focused quadrant
e	edit task title
t	rename the focused quadrant
x / enter	complete task (moves to archive)
m then 1–4	move task to quadrant
d twice	delete task permanently
u	undo the last change
U / ctrl+r	redo
v	archive view (r there restores a task)
s	space picker (enter switch, n new, r rename, d twice delete)
] / [	next / previous space
f	data file picker (o there types a path)
p	show the plan attached to the selected task
P	ask an agent to draft a plan
c	open a Claude Code session and talk the plan through (resumes the task's)
C	same, but to work on it together
D	delegate the task to an agent, or reattach to a run already going
?	toggle help
q	quit

Changes made by the CLI or MCP server while the TUI is open appear within ~2 seconds.

A dim ◆ mcp marker sits in the footer while agent access is enabled. No marker means nothing but you can reach the matrix. After a title, ✎ means the task has a plan attached, ⌁ that it has a conversation you can pick back up, and ⣾ that an agent is working on it right now.

CLI

ike add "Fix prod bug" -q 1     # quadrant 1-4; defaults to 2 (Schedule)
ike list                        # active tasks grouped by quadrant
ike list -q 1 --json            # filter + machine-readable output
ike done 3                      # complete task 3 (archives it)
ike mv 3 2                      # move task 3 to quadrant 2
ike reorder 3 up                # up | down | top | bottom, within its quadrant
ike rm 3                        # delete permanently (no archive)
ike archive                     # completed tasks, newest first
ike restore 3                   # un-archive task 3, back to its quadrant
ike undo                        # revert the last change, from any frontend
ike redo                        # re-apply the last undone change
ike label 1 "Firefighting"      # rename a quadrant (--reset restores the default)

ike plan 3                      # draft a plan for task 3
ike delegate 3                  # hand task 3 to an agent
ike agent status                # whether ike may run an agent

ike space                       # list spaces
ike list -s work                # act on one space just this once
ike --file /path/to.json list   # act on a different data file

Agents

Both directions are off by default, and they are separate decisions: letting an agent edit your task list and letting ike start a process that edits your files have very different blast radii.

ike mcp enable      # let an MCP client read and manage this matrix
ike agent enable    # let ike run an agent on a task's working directory

Serving your matrix over MCP. ike mcp runs a stdio server with tools for listing, adding, completing, moving, reordering, archiving, and undoing — scoped to one space if you launch it that way. ike mcp disable takes effect immediately, even on a client already connected.

ike mcp enable
claude mcp add ike -- ike mcp

Handing a task over. ike plan 3 asks an agent to explore the task's directory and draft a plan, which is attached to the task for you to read and edit — that run is read-only and needs no permission. ike delegate 3 then carries the plan out and streams what it does. -i on either hands you the terminal for a real Claude Code session instead, resuming the same conversation each time you come back to the task.

A delegated run never completes the task. You read what it did and decide.

→ docs/agents.md covers the consent gates, what a delegated run is actually allowed to do (with measurements — the permission modes are not a safety ladder), how ike picks an effort level per run, and where plans are stored.

Spaces and data

One file holds several independent matrices, called spaces — work and personal, say. Each has its own tasks, archive, headings, ID numbering, and undo history, so ike undo in one can never reach into another.

ike space new work
ike space use work              # every later command follows
ike add "Fix prod bug" -s work  # or act on one space just once

Everything lives in ~/.local/share/ike/tasks.json (mode 0600, in a 0700 directory). Writes go through a lock file and an atomic rename with the previous contents kept as .bak, so three frontends can run at once and an interrupted write costs one change rather than the matrix. The file is self-contained and portable — copy it to another machine and every space comes with it.

→ docs/data.md covers spaces in full, exporting and importing a single matrix, the file's durability guarantees and their one caveat (flock on network mounts), undo/redo semantics, and renaming quadrants.

Platform support

Linux and macOS. Both run the full test suite on every change, and release archives are built for darwin/amd64, darwin/arm64, linux/amd64, and linux/arm64.

Windows is not supported, and is not on the roadmap. It is not built, not released, and not tested. go install will probably give you a working binary — nothing in ike is deliberately Unix-only — but the data file would land at %USERPROFILE%\.local\share\ike\tasks.json, following XDG conventions rather than anywhere a Windows user would think to look, and no Windows path is exercised by CI. So: unsupported rather than known-broken. A pull request adding proper path resolution together with Windows CI coverage would be welcome; one without the CI would just move the untested surface around.

Contributing

Bug reports and focused pull requests are welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the build commands, how the three frontends sit over one store, and the store invariants worth knowing before changing it. Security issues go through SECURITY.md rather than the issue tracker.

License

MIT. Third-party dependencies and their licenses — all permissive, none copyleft — are listed in THIRD_PARTY_LICENSES.md.

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Logo based on Eisenhower's official White House portrait of May 29, 1959 (White House / Eisenhower Presidential Library). It is a work of an employee of the Executive Office of the President made as part of their official duties, and so is in the public domain as a work of the U.S. federal government. No attribution is required; it is recorded here so anyone redistributing ike can verify the claim for themselves.