seed

A local-first TUI wellness companion. Reminders you type. A mandala that grows with your care.

Why

We don't drink enough water. We don't stand up. We forget to look out the window. Not because we don't want to — because the friction of remembering slowly burns out the impulse before we act on it.

Seed takes the energy of a progression game and turns it into something that cares about you. A background daemon tracks nine wellness traits — hydration, nourishment, movement, posture, vision, breath, rest, presence, alignment — and nudges at the right moments. In the terminal, a living mandala unfolds as you respond. Each reminder you answer pours XP into a trait. The glyph reflects that back.

The companion should grow, mature, change, evolve endlessly based on your success. At level 1 it's a sparse seed. At level 99 across all nine traits it shimmers at zenith. The care is the reward loop. The glyph is the proof.

What you get

• Background daemon (seedd) that tracks reminders and fires OS notifications
• Terminal UI (seed) with a generative mandala that evolves with 9 wellness traits: flow, core, spine, reach, clarity, space, depth, resonance, warmth
• Type the action word to log a reminder. mandala grows. levels rise.
• Local-first. No cloud. State at ~/.seed/. Event-log shaped so a future p2p sync layer can wrap without a rewrite.
• Cosmetic palettes (sage / dusk / mist / ember / moss), OSRS-style XP progression (1-99, lvl 92 ≈ halfway), SEED → ZENITH tier progression

Install

From source (only install method at v0):

git clone <this repo>
cd seed
cargo build --release

Binaries land in target/release/:

• seed — the TUI
• seedd — the daemon (auto-spawned by seed if not running)

Requires Rust 2024 edition (pinned via rust-toolchain.toml). No other system dependencies.

Linux desktop notifications require a running notification daemon (most DEs ship one). macOS and Windows use their native notification center via notify-rust.

Quickstart

seed init     # scaffold ~/.seed/config.toml
seed          # launch the TUI (auto-spawns seedd in the background)

First run: the mandala appears as a sparse seed. Type water + Enter. Watch the flow trait XP tick up. Do the same across the 9 traits over time and the mandala unfolds.

Commands

• <verb> <Enter> — log a reminder: water, eat, stand, walk, stretch, look, breathe, rest, align
• /<trait> <level> — debug: set a trait to any level 1-99 (e.g. /flow 50)
• help — command reference
• / — focus the command bar
• Tab / Shift+Tab — cycle side panel tabs (LIST / LEVELS / LOG)
• q — quit

Dev mode

Launch with --dev (or SEED_DEV=1) to expose an extra side-panel tab:

seed --dev

The TWEAKS tab adds a palette selector, manual reminder trigger, and state reset — useful while iterating, but gated behind a flag so everyday use stays driven by reminders alone. There is no default hotkey for this tab; it's reached via Tab like the others once enabled.

Config

Everything lives at ~/.seed/ (override with SEED_HOME):

~/.seed/
  config.toml       # edit me
  events.jsonl      # append-only reminder log
  snapshot.json     # periodic state snapshot
  seedd.log         # daemon logs (daily-rotated)
  seed.log          # TUI logs

config.toml example (copy from the scaffold — run seed init first):

# seed configuration
# All keys are optional — omit any line to keep the default.

# Hours during which notifications are active (24-hour clock).
active_hours = [7, 22]

# Default snooze duration in minutes.
snooze_min = 5

# Colour palette: sage | dusk | mist | ember | moss
palette = "sage"

# Notification style: standard | flash | silent
notif_style = "flash"

# Deterministic seed for glyph generation.
glyph_seed = 42

# Per-reminder overrides. Omit any section to use the default.
# [reminders.water]
# interval_min = 45
# enabled = true

Key fields:

• active_hours = [7, 22] — notifications fire only between 7am and 10pm
• snooze_min = 5 — default snooze duration
• palette = "sage" — one of sage / dusk / mist / ember / moss
• [reminders.water] — per-reminder override of interval_min and enabled

Terminal compatibility

seed renders with braille + truecolor by default. On terminals that don't support them:

• Braille: set SEED_FORCE_ASCII=1 to swap the glyph's inner core to block characters
• Truecolor: set SEED_FORCE_256=1 to quantize to the 256-color cube

Tested on: Windows Terminal, iTerm2, kitty, wezterm, alacritty.

Troubleshooting

Stopping the daemon on Windows. seed auto-spawns seedd as a detached process. Closing the TUI does not stop it (by design — you still get notifications). To stop it manually: taskkill /IM seedd.exe /F in a shell, or end it from Task Manager.

Glyph appears empty on cold start. seed connects to the daemon and waits up to 3 seconds for the initial state snapshot. On slow disks or with antivirus scanning, the daemon may take a moment to start. The glyph will fill in when the snapshot arrives; any commands typed in the interim are safe.

No notifications despite being in active hours. Check that active_hours in config.toml is set correctly (e.g. active_hours = [7, 22]). A zero-length window like [7, 7] silently disables all notifications — the config loader rejects this with a clear error.

Daemon disconnects during a session. The TUI auto-reconnects with exponential backoff (200ms → 5s cap). Commands sent while disconnected are lost — the status bar will show reconnecting. If the glyph freezes and commands have no effect, check ~/.seed/seedd.log.

Pour integration

seed is a sibling to pour — a terminal capture tool. A future pour module will tail ~/.seed/events.jsonl to pour structured reminder entries into your Obsidian vault. v0 exposes the event schema (see seed - docs/02 references/events-schema.md) but ships no coupling. Either project works standalone.

Tech stack

Area	Crate
TUI	ratatui + crossterm
IPC	interprocess (local socket / named pipe) + length-prefixed JSON
Async	tokio
Serialization	serde + serde_json + toml
Notifications	notify-rust
Time	chrono
Logging	tracing + tracing-appender

Development

cargo build --workspace
cargo test --workspace
cargo clippy --workspace -- -D warnings
cargo fmt --all

Run the daemon in the foreground with verbose logging:

SEED_LOG=debug cargo run --bin seedd -- --foreground

Run the smoke test (spawns a real daemon process):

cargo test --test smoke -- --ignored

Full docs in the Obsidian vault at seed - docs/. Wave-by-wave build logs in seed - docs/05 notes/build-log-*.md; consolidated v0 plan in seed - docs/09 milestones/v0-mvp.md; active backlog in seed - docs/00 index/BACKLOG.kanban.md (board) and seed - docs/08 specs/v0-1-0-punch-list.md (prose). The docs/ directory at the project root is the GitHub Pages export target — build output, not source.

License

MIT.