For about fifteen years, my boards lived in Trello. It was the right tool for most of those years — fast, obvious, friendly. Then, the way these things go, it grew. More menus, more Power-Ups, more upsells, more loading spinners. A tool I used to think with started asking for my attention instead. And underneath it all sat one fact I had managed to ignore for a decade and a half: every card I wrote lived in someone else’s database.
Someone recommended Obsidian plus the kanban plugin (obsidian-kanban). The first time I
opened a board and realized it was just a Markdown file — headings as lanes, - [ ]
items as cards — something clicked permanently. The board wasn’t an app’s data anymore.
It was my note.
The plugin-of-a-plugin years
obsidian-kanban eventually went quiet (GPL, unmaintained these days). I didn’t leave — I did something objectively sadder: I started writing plugins for the plugin. Small patches around it, helpers on top of it, fixes for the parts that hurt on an iPad. Plugins for a plugin. There is no dignity in that sentence.
At some point the math flipped: rebuilding the whole table was easier than patching someone else’s. So I did — clean-room, from scratch, MIT.
Cards, not kanban
The rebuild also fixed something conceptual that had bugged me all along. I never
wanted “kanban” — workflow stages, WIP limits, process. What I had actually been doing
since the Trello days was much simpler: spreading cards out on a table and tugging them
around until they made sense. So that’s what tugtile is — a card table for Markdown
notes. Tiles are cards, ## headings are the lanes they line up in, and the table
is a plain .md file.
tugtile’s native tongue is tiles — but it speaks fluent kanban: obsidian-kanban boards just open (same frontmatter, same cards, same settings block, same archive), and the original markers stay in place until you choose to upgrade, so going back stays possible. If you’re still on that unmaintained plugin: your boards are welcome at the table.
tugtile on GitHub — MIT, CJK-first, no network, no telemetry. Sister plugin marktile gives you the same editor as a standalone Markdown pane.