linear-term - a TUI for Linear

Background

A little over a decade ago, toward the start of my Ph.D., I started programming for real work for the first time. I was doing data analysis in C++ using ROOT (and yes, data analysis in C++ is as awful as it sounds). At the time, My advisor was the first person to introduce me to a terminal and to emacs. I’m pretty sure when I wasn’t looking, he aliased emacs = emacs -nw just so I could do all work through the terminal.

In 2018, I switched to VSCode. The integrated terminal made it feel like a one-stop-shop - everything in one program, no context switching, plus a rich editing experience. But I’ve always missed parts of a terminal-only workflow, and lately I’ve been drifting back to it.

This has made me a sucker for terminal-based tooling. One friction point I noticed recently: there isn’t a good terminal user interface (TUI) for Linear project management, which forces me to context-switch into the native app to log progress, comment on issues, etc. So this past weekend I hacked together my own.

linear-term

linear-term is the TUI I put together (repo here). It was built using textual in python. The original design was intended to look similar to the native app, but within the terminal.

It’s a 3-panel layout: the center shows your issues, the right panel shows issue details once selected, and the left panel has filtering options. You can toggle through each via TAB or F1, F2, F3.

I also created a kanban board view, accessible via b, where you can look at issues by their status.

I also added some CLI tools. There are existing Linear CLIs out there, but I wanted this to be enough of a one-stop-shop that you didn’t have to install a bunch of other tools.

For example:

$ linear-term list --mine
TJB-1 [Backlog] --- Get familiar with Linear @Tyler Burch
TJB-4 [Done] --- Import your data @Tyler Burch
TJB-3 [In Progress] --- Connect your tools @Tyler Burch
TJB-2 [Todo] --- Set up your teams @Tyler Burch

I mainly put this together for my own use, but please feel free to use it if you’re interested. Happy to hear feedback, or take contributions too.

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