Daybook

A super simple daily planner with a painting of the day. Plan the morning,
shut down in the evening, and let your AI agents do the typing.

daybooksalon.vercel.app ·
Watch it in 50 seconds ·
Download for Mac

Get started

Daybook opens on one button. Press Start and your days stay in that
browser: free, private, no account, no setup. When you want the same days on
every device, the Mac app, AI agents, Linear or your Frame, run your own
Daybook in the cloud and open it with its key.

• In a browser. Deploy Daybook with no settings at all
  (one click on Vercel),
  or run it on your computer. Open it and press Start. To keep
  it as an app: the install icon in Chrome or Edge, File → Add to Dock in
  Safari, Share → Add to Home Screen on an iPhone or iPad.
• In your own cloud. Vercel and Upstash on their free plans, and a key you
  make: see Deploy your own. Then choose Open it with
  your key under Start.
• On a Mac. Download Daybook.dmg,
  drag it into Applications and open it. Press Start my day: your days stay on that
  Mac, with nothing to set up. It updates itself from then on. To share the
  days with a cloud Daybook (your phone, agents, Linear, the Frame), use
  Settings → Connect.
• With your AI agents. In a cloud Daybook, Settings → AI agents makes a
  token and the exact setup for Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Codex and more. See
  Connect your agents.

What's in it

Daybook is a small, open-source take on Sunsama's
rituals. It shares its look and its 44 public-domain paintings with
Frame Dashboard. With a
Frame connected, Daybook hangs whatever painting the TV shows that day, with its
story; without one, it uses the same rotation as the Frame's Impressionists pack.

• Today. One focus line, a short list of tasks with time estimates, and
  how much you've planned against your capacity (6 hours by default).
  Unfinished tasks roll over to the next day and remember where they started.
  Click a task to rename it, tag it, time it or move it. Tick one and it moves
  under the ones still to do (Settings → Appearance can keep it in place).
• Plan the day. Planning takes the whole window: your meetings in a narrow
  column, the day you're building in the middle, and only tasks on the right,
  from the backlog or from Linear. Write new ones (into the day or the
  backlog), edit or delete them without leaving the plan, and reorder by
  dragging: the task lifts and follows the pointer, and the other rows part
  to show where it will land (hold it a moment on a touchscreen).
• Week. One card with a column per day, Sunsama style. Pick up a task
  from the backlog or any day and put it on a line of another day, or back in
  the backlog: it lifts and follows the pointer, and the rows part where it
  will land. Each day turns amber when it's over capacity.
• Wrap up (shutdown). The same painting at dusk. You see what got done, choose
  where unfinished work goes (tomorrow, the backlog, or stay), and write one
  line for the journal.
• Agents first. A built-in MCP server works with Claude, Cursor, Codex,
  ChatGPT, Grok and any other MCP client. It has tools for every action and
  prompts for the morning, evening and Monday rituals. There's also a REST
  API and a small CLI.
• Linear. Your open assigned issues land in the backlog. Finishing one in
  Daybook completes it in Linear.
• Frame Dashboard. Two-way sync with your TV and Frame Desk. To-dos ticked,
  added or removed there come back to Daybook, Daybook's week goes to the TV,
  and the TV's meetings show up on Today. Pick the TV's design (painting by
  day, salon, or painting always) from the Week screen, the Mac app or an agent.
• On this device, or in your own cloud. The first screen has one button,
  Start my day: your days stay in the browser, with no account and no backend.
  Once a week Today asks you to keep a copy, and Settings → Your data exports
  one, imports one, or erases everything. The same file moves you to a cloud
  Daybook later; the small line at the bottom of the first screen, "Already
  have one here? Open it with your key", opens one.
• Three designs, three palettes. A museum wall label, a timetable with wide
  numerals and blocks of time, or a written notebook; in Salon (bone and
  cobalt), Modern (white and one red dot) or Nocturne (blue-black and gilt).
  Settings → Appearance, with an option to turn to Nocturne after shutdown.
• Mac app. The full Daybook in a window, a glance at today in the menu
  bar, and a shutdown reminder; your days stay on the Mac until you connect a
  cloud Daybook (then Frame sync every two minutes too). It opens on a
  wall of paintings and updates itself. Signed and notarized: download Daybook.dmg
  (macOS 14+, Apple silicon and Intel). See mac/README.md.
• Windows app (preview). The full Daybook in a window, your days kept on
  the PC, and a tray icon. Not code-signed yet, no cloud Daybook or menu-bar
  glance yet. See windows/README.md.

Plan the day (Timetable, Modern)	Week (Notebook)

Wrap up (Timetable)

Run it

You need Node 20 or later and pnpm 10.

pnpm install
cp .env.example .env.local      # optional locally: works with no key and stores data in .data/
pnpm dev                        # http://localhost:3000

Without DAYBOOK_KEY, pnpm dev lets in anyone who can reach it (it listens
on your network too) and keeps its data in .data/daybook.json. Any other
server without a key, pnpm start included, offers only "on this device".

The UI is in English or Spanish (DAYBOOK_LOCALE=en|es), and the time zone
that decides "today" is DAYBOOK_TZ.

The landing page

daybooksalon.vercel.app is Daybook's public page
(site/): the painting of the day in a salon hang, the rotation, the Frame, the
Mac app and how to install it. It is its own Next.js app and Vercel project
(Root Directory site); see site/README.md.

Deploy your own

Just the app. Deploy with no settings at all. Everyone who opens it uses
Daybook on their own device: their days stay in their browser, and the server
keeps nothing. No database, no key.

A cloud Daybook (Vercel + Upstash). For the same days everywhere, the Mac
app, agents, Linear and Frame:

1. Import the repo in Vercel. Under Storage → Create Database → Upstash for
   Redis (the free plan is enough), connect it to the project. That sets
   KV_REST_API_URL and KV_REST_API_TOKEN.
2. Set DAYBOOK_KEY (openssl rand -hex 24), DAYBOOK_TZ, and optionally
   LINEAR_API_KEY, FRAME_DASHBOARD_URL and FRAME_DASHBOARD_WRITE_KEY.
   .env.example explains each one.
3. Set CRON_SECRET too. Vercel Cron then calls /api/cron/sync once a
   day (see vercel.json) to sync Linear and the Frame. On a Pro plan you
   can make it every 10 minutes (*/10 * * * *).
4. Deploy, open the site, choose Open it with your key at the bottom of
   the first screen, and enter your key once in each browser you use.
5. In the Mac app, Settings → Connect a cloud Daybook: the address of your
   deployment and the same key. The days already on that Mac come along.

When you deploy a new version, pages that are already open show a small
Update mark beside the Settings gear; a click reloads them.

How it fits together

 Web app ─┐                                  ┌─ Frame Dashboard (its own Vercel project)
 Mac app ─┼─▶ Daybook on Vercel ─▶ Upstash   │    TV + Frame Desk edit its plan
 Agents  ─┘   (/api, /api/mcp)   ◀─ sync ───▶┘    (two-way, three-way merge)
  (MCP)                          ◀─ sync ─── Linear

Daybook on Vercel is the one source of truth. The web app, the Mac app and
your agents all read and write it with the same key. Frame sync is
server-side, using FRAME_DASHBOARD_URL and FRAME_DASHBOARD_WRITE_KEY, and
it runs:

• after every change, when FRAME_AUTO_SYNC=true;
• every 2 minutes while the Mac app is open;
• on the Vercel Cron schedule;
• when you press Sync with Frame.

A cloud Daybook needs storage (Upstash on Vercel) and DAYBOOK_KEY; without
them a deploy only offers "on this device". Anyone with the key can read and
change your plan, so treat it like a password.

Connect your agents

Open Settings (the gear in the navigation). For Linear and Frame
Dashboard, paste their keys; Daybook checks them and stores them encrypted.
For an AI client, pick it from the list:

• Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and Grok;
• Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, VS Code and Windsurf;
• Meta Llama Stack, or any other MCP client.

Daybook creates a token just for that client and shows the exact setup, with
a one-click install for Cursor and VS Code. Revoke a token there at any time.

To do it by hand: the MCP endpoint is https://<your-daybook>/api/mcp (Streamable HTTP, JSON
responses). Agents authenticate with Authorization: Bearer <DAYBOOK_KEY>.
For clients that can't send headers, such as ChatGPT connectors, use
?key=<DAYBOOK_KEY> instead.

DAYBOOK_URL=https://your-daybook.vercel.app DAYBOOK_KEY=… node cli/daybook.mjs setup           # print every snippet
DAYBOOK_URL=… DAYBOOK_KEY=… node cli/daybook.mjs setup cursor codex --write                    # write configs (with backups)

See docs/agents.md for the full setup, the tool list and the
REST API. Then ask your agent to "plan my day".

CLI

node cli/daybook.mjs today
node cli/daybook.mjs add "Draft deck 45m #client" --date tomorrow
node cli/daybook.mjs done <id>
node cli/daybook.mjs mcp          # stdio MCP relay for clients without remote MCP

Development

pnpm verify     # lint, typecheck, tests, production build

The design was drawn in Paper (the maintainer's file, not public); you don't
need it to contribute. Colours, type and spacing live in app/globals.css as
palette variables (data-palette) and per-design rules (data-style).

Art and fonts

The 44 paintings are in the public domain. They are scans from
Wikimedia Commons, shared with Frame
Dashboard and resized to WebP in public/art/. Each painting's source page is
in lib/art.json, and the credit on screen links to it.
Schibsted Grotesk,
Archivo and
Brygada 1918 are under the
SIL Open Font License. The Mac app bundles
Instrument Sans and
Instrument Serif, also
OFL, with their licence files.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md,
and report security issues privately as described in
SECURITY.md.

License

MIT for the code.