redthread: a corkboard and sticky notes for your terminal
June 11, 2026 · 9:16 AM

redthread: a corkboard and sticky notes for your terminal

redthread (MIT, 36★, Go) is a Bubble Tea TUI that renders an ASCII corkboard with sticky notes and red-string connections directly in the terminal — built by solo developer Juan Fourie to live permanently in a tmux pane. Supports mouse drag, 5 zoom levels, 9 note colors, Unicode font variants, and connection strings between notes. Install is `go install github.com/B33pBeeps/redthread@latest`, requiring Go 1.23+; no Homebrew, apt, or prebuilt binaries exist.

CLI Tool Pick
CLI Tool Pick@NeoDrop Official
You have a tmux layout that's been open for three days. One pane runs a log tail, one holds your editor, one is free for misc commands. But the thing that's actually missing is a place to hold the tangled mental map you're navigating — the three open questions, the two blocked tasks, the one person you need to follow up with, and the thread connecting all of them. A floating .txt file doesn't cut it. A Notion board is too far away.
redthread is a Go TUI that puts a corkboard directly in the terminal. Sticky notes arranged on an ASCII-rendered corkboard surface, with colored string connections drawn between them. The author, Juan Fourie (GitHub: B33pBeeps), built it to "live in a tmux pane, always open." 1
MIT license. 36★ on GitHub. 22 commits by a single human author, spanning April 24 to May 14 2026. Listed on Terminal Trove on June 9 2026. 2
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What you get

The corkboard itself is navigable: mouse drag to reposition notes, keyboard navigation between panels, and zoom across 5 levels so you can pull back to see the full board or zoom in on a cluster. Notes support 9 color tones, 9 highlight colors, and 8 text fonts built from Unicode math alphabets — enough visual differentiation to keep categories distinct without leaving the terminal.
The "red thread" in the name is literal: you draw connection strings between notes to mark relationships, the same way investigators pin evidence together on a physical board. It's a deliberate spatial metaphor.
State persists to $XDG_DATA_HOME/redthread/notes.json, a JSON workspace envelope, so your board survives across sessions and reboots.

Install

redthread has one install path: go install. No Homebrew formula, no apt package, no prebuilt binaries. 1
go install github.com/B33pBeeps/redthread/cmd/redthread@latest
Requires Go 1.23 or later. Run go version first — if it returns below 1.23, update via go.dev/dl before trying to install.
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If you don't have Go installed and don't want to set it up, this tool isn't accessible today. There's no workaround — no Docker image, no release binary. This is the real friction point for non-Go developers, and it's worth naming directly: redthread is currently Go-only.

A scenario: sprint planning in a tmux pane

You're kicking off a sprint and want to keep the task map visible while you work. Open a new pane in your existing tmux session, then:
redthread
The corkboard opens. Create a note for each task. Use different color tones to mark status (yellow = in progress, green = done, red = blocked). Draw connection strings between dependent tasks. Leave it open in the corner pane.
Throughout the day, you can mouse-drag a note to reposition it as context shifts, or zoom out to see the whole board without switching windows. When the sprint ends, the JSON file has a record of what you built.
redthread in action — Terminal Trove preview showing the corkboard interface with connected notes
Terminal Trove directory preview of redthread 2

Under the hood

Built on Charmbracelet Bubble Tea — the same Go TUI framework behind tools like glow, soft-serve, and yesterday's pick dskditto. The dependency list is deliberately minimal: Bubble Tea, Bubbles, Lipgloss (Charm's styling layer), and a clipboard library. No AI/LLM dependencies. Zero external services.
The author holds the sole MIT copyright: "MIT — use it, fork it, do whatever." 1

Caveats

  • Go 1.23+ required, no prebuilts. This is the dominant practical barrier. Engineers on machines where they don't manage the toolchain, or who work primarily in Node/Python/Rust, face a setup step before they see any value.
  • Zero community signal. No Hacker News thread, no Reddit post, no Lobsters discussion. 36 stars across ~3 weeks of public life. The tool works, but there's no external testimony from practitioners yet.
  • No release tags. Installing @latest pins to the most recent commit on main, not a tagged release. Stable enough at 22 commits, but worth noting for reproducibility.
  • Single maintainer, three weeks of history. 22 commits from one person. The pace was active through May 14 — whether development continues is unknown.
Install: go install github.com/B33pBeeps/redthread/cmd/redthread@latest (requires Go 1.23+)

References

  1. 1GitHub — B33pBeeps/redthread
  2. 2Terminal Trove — redthread

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