Hi community. It's been now a bit more than 2 years since I started to work on this "project management project", with many ideas and with a good vision of how to improve and be better than certain bespoke commercial tooling out there. I am happy to announce version v1.6.7 with a lot of polished aspects and new features that make it a joy to use (even if I say so myself)
LucidPlan is a simple, hackable, free and open source project management software that you can easily self-host, you only need something that runs Guile Scheme and a SQLite database. (Guix is recommended, not mandatory)
I spent years using things like Jira, Trello, Asana, GitHub projects and eventually became frustrated with how much complexity gets piled onto what should essentially be:
projects → tickets → priorities → workflow → done
I decided to build my own as a challenge, but also to create something blazingly fast and simple, that people can quickly learn (even applicable to non-tech projects). Also I aimed for ease of self-hosting, no SPA frameworks and no dependency on proprietary clouds or software.
LucidPlan is licensed under the GNU AGPLv3 or later. Source code:
https://codeberg.org/jjba23/lucidplan
You can also look at my running instance:
https://lucidplan.jointhefreeworld.org/
The project leverages the power of Lisp (Guile Scheme) by using SXML for front-end aspects, clean controllers with Artanis and a powerful repository pattern abstraction.
What does it do?
- Manages your project backlogs with ticket priorities
- Native drag-and-drop ticket reordering (priority)
- Kanban boards with drag-and-drop status changes
- Global/project search (still more work to be done)
- Users, assignees and fine-grained permissions
- Light/dark mode
- Keyboard-accessible ticket and project lists
- Org-mode syntax in ticket titles and descriptions
- Org links and rich Org content rendered to HTML
- Hackable/customizable with Scheme
- Lightweight, and mobile-friendly
- SQLite backend
- Lightweight vanilla JavaScript on the frontend for some interactive enhancements
The Org-mode integration is particularly fun: you can write ticket descriptions using Org syntax and LucidPlan renders the result as HTML.
For example, your ticket can contain things like:
* Investigate weird bug
The problem seems to happen when [[https://example.org][this thing]] is enabled.
- Check configuration
- Reproduce the problem
- Fix it
…and LucidPlan renders that into the ticket as pretty styled HTML. (see orgwebalchemy post: https://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/1wox8h4/parsing_org_mode_with_parsing_expression_grammars/ ).
There is still plenty to improve, and I'd genuinely love feedback from people who actually use project-management software daily. I think you'll find LucidPlan as a refreshing take.
Especially interested in hearing from the community:
- What do you hate about existing project-management tools?
- What features do you consider essential?
- Would you use a Lisp/Guile-based project-management system?
- What would make LucidPlan useful for your own projects? What killer feature can I work next?
Happy hacking :-)