kairos

The frustration was simple: I'd be deep in a coding session and get a flash of an idea or a task I couldn't lose — but by the time I switched context to write it down, it was gone. I needed something that was literally one keypress away in the terminal, zero friction to capture the thought and get straight back to work. Nothing I tried was fast enough or stayed out of my way, so I built kairos.

Install it with one line, run kairos --sample, and press n. Type the task however it comes to mind — "call dentist next monday high priority" — and watch it rewrite itself into proper todo.txt. Hit Enter twice and you're done. That's the whole point: thought in, task saved, back to work in under ten seconds

Every other tool I tried either corrupted the file when my sync client touched it, or needed a daemon running in the background to stay in sync. kairos does neither. Every write is atomic — temp file, then rename — so nothing can corrupt your todo.txt. And if anything external changes the file, kairos just picks it up silently on the next keypress. One file in, one file out. No surprises.