TaskCards

Sticky notes that remember where things are — keyboard-first boards over Obsidian TaskNotes, on Omarchy.

Stack: Quickshell / QML, Obsidian TaskNotes Status: Public Links: github.com/achagani/omarchy-taskcards

Screenshot from the project — polished board view over Obsidian TaskNotes.

Grouped-grid layout — spatial topic groupings persisted separately from the task data.

01The problem

Task lists flatten everything. In a to-do app, every task is one row in one long column, and position carries no meaning — the third item this morning is the third item tonight only by accident of sorting. That throws away the way people actually manage visible work. Pin notes to a wall and you stop remembering what you wrote and start remembering where it is: top-left is the launch, the cluster near the door is the errands. Spatial memory is a real cognitive tool, and almost every digital task system discards it in favor of the search box.

The second half of the problem is capture. A thought is worth about ten seconds. If writing it down means alt-tabbing, opening an app, finding the right list, and clicking a button, the thought evaporates first.

02The approach

TaskCards puts sticky notes back on the wall — the desktop wall. It runs as an overlay on Omarchy, the Arch-based distribution built around the Hyprland compositor and Quickshell, the framework for writing desktop widgets in QML. The boards sit above the workspace, always visible, never a window you have to raise. Tasks come from Obsidian TaskNotes, a plugin whose central bet is that a task is just a Markdown note: a file with YAML frontmatter carrying title, status, priority, due, and project links, and a freeform body underneath. TaskCards reads those plain-text files and renders them as cards you arrange into topic layouts — a board per subject, positioned once, recognized at a glance thereafter. Capture is a keystroke: a card appears, you type, it's in the vault. Three skins keep the wall your taste, not the framework's.

03Trade-offs

Overlay widgets vs. app windows. An overlay is always present with zero alt-tab cost, but it lives outside normal window management: no chrome, no taskbar entry, and a discipline about keyboard focus so the wall never steals input from the work underneath. Quickshell exists precisely to make that tractable on a Wayland compositor.

TaskNotes as backend vs. a dedicated task app. The board is a view, not the source of truth. Tasks stay plain Markdown in an Obsidian vault — readable by any tool, syncable through Obsidian or git, greppable, diffable, and portable to whatever replaces TaskNotes someday. The cost is that the schema isn't ours: board behavior rides on the plugin's frontmatter conventions, and every interaction round-trips through files rather than a database query.

Keyboard-first has a learning curve. Before the bindings are muscle memory, a keyboard-only capture flow is slower than a mouse click you already know. The bet is that capture is repeated thousands of times and the curve is paid once — and that a mouse-free loop is the only kind that survives a tiling window manager.

04Under the hood

The architecture keeps three concerns cleanly apart. The vault is data: TaskNotes Markdown files with YAML frontmatter, watched for changes so edits made in Obsidian appear on the wall without a restart. The board is layout: card positions and topic groupings persist separately from the task data, so arranging your wall never rewrites your notes, and a note edited in Obsidian never jumps off the wall. The overlay is presentation: a Quickshell QML layer drawn over Hyprland's workspaces, with keyboard bindings for capture, focus, and status changes, and three interchangeable skins swapping the card styling wholesale. It's a small, deliberate stack — plain text in, spatial memory out — built for the way one person actually thinks.