🌱 Taman Devlog #1 — Plant-Powered Pomodoro in Your Terminal

Welcome to the very first development log of Taman, a Rust-powered TUI Pomodoro app where your productivity grows plants — literally! The idea is simple: every time you complete a focus session, your little plant evolves from a 🌰 seed into a 🌳 mini tree.

This devlog documents the early building blocks of the project: architecture decisions, UI concepts using Ratatui, the swap from ASCII art to emoji plants, and the direction for charts and statistics.

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🌿 What Is Taman?

Taman is a terminal-based productivity app built in Rust using:

• ratatui for the TUI widgets
• crossterm for terminal backend + input
• serde / JSON for saving progress
• tui-big-text for large timer digits

It’s designed to be:

• ✨ cute (plants grow!)
• 🧭 navigable by keyboard only
• 🎨 theme-aware (System / Rose Pine Light / Rose Pine Dark)
• 📈 stats-rich, including charts
• 🪴 game-ified, but without distractions

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🌻 The Core Loop: Grow a Plant by Focusing

Instead of coins, XP, or badges, Taman grows a single plant at a time.

Plant lifecycle:

1. 🌰 Seed
2. 🌱 Sprout
3. 🌸 Flower
4. 🌳 Mini Tree

Each completed focus session advances growth.
When the plant reaches 🌳, it is archived in the garden, and a fresh 🌰 seed begins.

Plants display as emojis — simple, readable, consistent across terminals.

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🧱 Project Architecture (High-Level)

src/
├─ main.rs
├─ app.rs // global app state
├─ input.rs // keyboard handling
├─ timer.rs // pomodoro logic
├─ plant.rs // plant model (emoji-based)
├─ garden.rs // history + streaks
├─ stats.rs // data aggregation
├─ storage.rs // JSON persistence
├─ theme.rs // theme manager
└─ ui/
├─ timer_ui.rs
├─ plant_ui.rs
├─ stats_ui.rs
└─ settings_ui.rs

Each tab renders independently and communicates only via AppState.

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🎛️ UI Tabs Overview

1. ⏳ Timer Tab

• Large timer via tui-big-text
• Gauge for session progress
• Blocks for:
  • base session types
  • auto-run queue
• Keyboard-driven start/pause/stop
• Running → increments plant progress

2. 🌿 Plant Tab

Displays:

• current plant icon (🌰 → 🌱 → 🌸 → 🌳)
• progress gauge
• sessions until next stage
• total plants completed

This tab is intentionally simple and cute.

3. 📊 Stats Tab

New metric model (daily):

• total sessions
• total minutes
• focus sessions
• minutes focused
• break sessions
• minutes resting

We support multiple visualizations:

• sparkline
• bar chart
• line chart
• pie chart (focus vs break)

UI concept:
Left = metric categories
Right = chart that updates when selected

4. ⚙️ Settings Tab

Dual-block layout with:

Left → category
Right → adjustable values

Auto-save when you leave the field.

Supports:

• focus duration
• break durations
• theme selection

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🌸 Why Emoji Plants Instead of ASCII Canvas?

We originally tried drawing plants on Ratatui’s Canvas widget.

It worked… but:

• ASCII scaling was inconsistent across terminals
• Canvas coordinates made early growth look sparse
• Users running tiny terminals couldn’t see enough detail
• Emojis are portable, readable, and cute

So we moved to an emoji model:

pub enum PlantStage {
    Seed,       // 🌰
    Sprout,     // 🌱
    Flower,     // 🌸
    Tree,       // 🌳
}

And the UI simply renders: Current plant: 🌱 Sprout (2 sessions until 🌸) Much cleaner. Much happier.

JSON Persistence Format

{
  "current_plant": {
    "stage": "Sprout",
    "sessions": 3
  },
  "garden_history": [
    { "completed_at": "2025-01-05T12:33:00Z" }
  ],
  "stats": {
    "daily": {
      "2025-01-05": {
        "focus_sessions": 3,
        "minutes_focused": 75,
        "break_sessions": 2,
        "minutes_resting": 10
      }
    }
  },
  "settings": {
    "durations": {
      "focus": 25,
      "short_break": 5,
      "long_break": 15
    },
    "theme": "RosePineDark"
  }
}

🚧 What’s Coming Next?

• Implementing real charts in the Stats tab
• Adding pie chart breakdowns (focus vs break)
• Garden history page? (mini trees lined up!)
• Polishing block navigation
• Packaging & publishing to crates.io

🌻 Closing Thoughts

This first devlog sets the foundation for Taman — the architecture, UI ideas, emoji plant design, and how stats will work. The next entries will focus on implementing real charts, animations, and saving/loading reliable daily metrics. 🌿 Grow your focus, grow your garden.