Beadbox

A fast, native GUI for the beads issue tracker.

Beadbox gives bd users a visual interface for the things a terminal can't show well — epic trees, dependency structure, pipeline state, and live activity — without making simple operations slower than typing bd show.

Features

• Epic tree — hierarchical view of epics and child beads with status, priority, and progress at a glance
• Live updates — changes made from the bd CLI appear in the UI in real time; no refresh
• Bead detail — full descriptions, comments, dependencies, and workflow advancement in a side panel or modal
• Filters — slice by status, type, priority, and assignee; filters persist across sessions
• Activity feed — a timeline of what changed, by whom, across the workspace
• Multi-workspace — switch between local .beads/ projects and remote Dolt server connections
• Keyboard-first — power-user paths work without touching the mouse

Install

Requires the beads CLI, version 1.0.1 or newer (brew install beads). Beadbox is a GUI over bd; all data lives in your beads database.

macOS

brew install --cask beadbox/cask/beadbox

Or download the DMG (Apple Silicon) from Releases. Builds are signed and notarized.

Linux and Windows

Download packages from Releases.

More at beadbox.app.

Build from source

Prerequisites: Bun, Rust (stable), Node.js, and the platform prerequisites for Tauri v2.

git clone https://github.com/beadbox/beadbox.git
cd beadbox
bun install

# Run the desktop app in development
bun run tauri:dev

# Or run the web client + server without the native shell
bun run dev

# Build a release bundle
bun run tauri:build

Architecture (short version)

Beadbox is a Tauri v2 app. The Rust shell spawns a Bun sidecar process and talks to it over stdio (kkrpc) — the app opens no network ports. All issue data flows through the bd CLI; Beadbox never touches the database behind bd's back. Live updates come from watching the workspace filesystem (local) or polling Dolt table hashes (server workspaces).

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md. Contributions are accepted under the MIT license — no CLA.

Security

To report a vulnerability, see SECURITY.md. Please don't open public issues for security reports.

License

MIT © 2026 Nelson Melo