Show HN: Todoglow – Keyboard-first todo app for macOS with MCP support
I'm the developer. I built this because every time I reached for the mouse to check off a todo, it broke my flow.
[Why]
5 years of coding on Mac. I tracked tasks in Notion and Jira, but the actual work — the atomic actions under each task — lived as checkboxes. I wanted to know how long each one took. todoglow isn't a replacement for your task tracker. It sits next to it — you break a task into atomic todos, work through them, and see how long each one actually takes. And if todos are small enough, you don't need categories, tags, or priorities. So I built an app that deliberately has none of those. No UI buttons either — I kept asking "is this actually necessary?" and usually the answer was no. (If you grew up on PC games, the keybind-driven UX might feel familiar.)
[How it works]
Working in your editor → Ctrl+Cmd+/ (summon todoglow) → / → type → Enter (start) → Ctrl+Cmd+. (focus bar — a thin strip above all windows showing your current todo) → back to work → Ctrl+Cmd+/ → a (jump to active todo) → Enter (complete).
Only one todo can be "in progress" at a time — the app enforces that.
[MCP]
Ships with an MCP server (stdio + HTTP). Agents can add todos, update status, report progress. The app is a target, not a platform.
[What I got wrong]
Shortcuts were US-keyboard-only. I didn't think about it. European users on QWERTZ and AZERTY couldn't hit half the keys — one of them printed out a US keyboard layout to use the app. But they stuck with it and kept reporting issues. Added keyboard layout selection. One user needed HTTP transport for Alter — added it. No mobile app yet, but there's a command mode that pushes to Apple Reminders for iPhone notifications.
[Other]
Idle-aware time tracking. Tauri v2 (Rust + React). macOS only.
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