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The Projects pane

Audience. Daily user.

When to read this. You want the day-to-day operations of the primary pane — how items are grouped, how to change a status, how the create modal works — gathered in one place.

The Projects pane is the left-hand view that renders every item in your conception (projects/**/*/README.md), one card per item, grouped by status. It is the first item on the activity rail, before Tasks, Deliverables, and Performance.

The condash window: the Projects pane grouping items under NOW / REVIEW / LATER / BACKLOG / DONE, with the Code pane alongside The condash window: the Projects pane grouping items under NOW / REVIEW / LATER / BACKLOG / DONE, with the Code pane alongside

The status stack

Items form one scrolling stack of status sections, in the fixed order now, review, later, backlog, done — plus a trailing ? section for any item whose status: isn't one of those five (a typo like wip lands there, card sprouting a red !? <value> badge so it stands out until corrected).

Two sections start collapsed:

  • backlog — the default for an item with no status: line at all.
  • done — subdivided into a "closed in the last 7 days" band at the top plus one collapsible subgroup per month, so a long history stays browsable without becoming a wall of cards.

The status values and their meanings are defined in Status model.

Change an item's status

Three ways, all equivalent:

  1. Drag the card to another section.
  2. Ctrl/Cmd+1…5 with the card focused — the shortcut row for now, review, later, backlog, done.
  3. Click the status pill in the item modal's header and pick a value.

All three rewrite the README's status: line in place — status: for YAML-frontmatter READMEs, **Status**: for the legacy bold-prose form. That one-line edit is the whole mutation: the card lands in its new section because the parser re-reads the file, not because condash keeps a record elsewhere. Every write condash is capable of is enumerated in Mutation model.

Create an item

Three entry points open the same New project modal:

  • the + New project ▾ button riding the NOW section header,
  • the + New button in the pane header,
  • File → New project… (Ctrl+N).

The modal asks for four things, in this order:

Field What to enter
Title Anything.
Slug Auto-derived from the Title and shown as a preview — click edit to override.
Kind project, incident, or document.
Status now, review, later, or backlog. (done is deliberately not offered here — you close an item, you don't create it closed.)

Picking Kind = incident reveals three more fields: Environment, Severity, and Severity impact. There is no Apps field — apps, branch, and base are things you add later, by editing the README or from the item's popup.

condash writes projects/<YYYY-MM>/<YYYY-MM-DD>-<slug>/README.md from the canonical template and creates an empty notes/ beside it. The CLI can do the same from a shell — condash projects create --kind project --slug <slug> --title "<title>" --apps <app> (the CLI is stricter: --kind, --slug, and --title are required (--apps optional, defaulting to empty), and --status rejects done). See CLI → projects.

Close and reopen

Closing is a status flip, not a move — a done item stays in its YYYY-MM/ folder forever; nothing is archived or renamed. Two ways to close:

  • the status pill in the modal, picking done, or
  • from a shell: condash projects close <slug> — which appends a dated Closed. timeline entry (annotated with --summary "<text>" if you give one).

A closed item that needs work again moves back with condash projects reopen <slug> (or the status pill), which appends a Reopened. entry. status set, close, and reopen share the timeline-append behaviour — see CLI → projects.

See also