Forward is a calm place to keep your life: Areas, Goals, Projects, Tasks and Pages, with an AI Coach that files what you capture and proposes a short list for each day. It is designed around what helps people with ADHD, and we think that makes it useful to anybody. Nothing in it is ever marked overdue.

The Community edition is Forward as open source software, under the Mozilla Public License 2.0. You build it yourself, you bring your own pieces, and it runs entirely on your own computer.

It is in development. Expect things to change.

Who it suits

• You are comfortable with a terminal, Node and git.
• You want to read the code that holds your life’s records, or change it.
• You would rather set a few things up yourself than have an account with anyone.

If you would rather open an app and begin, the Free and Premium editions are for you. They are not released yet. See the Forward home page.

What you get

• Today: a short list for this day, with Alternates held ready, and the Pool for everything else.
• The Coach: files a line you type under the right Area, Goal or Project, and proposes your Today with its reasons. Nothing is placed until you accept.
• Areas, Goals and Projects, each Project with its own Board.
• Pages: a wiki in Markdown, with links between Pages and pictures.
• GitHub issues as Tasks, kept in step both ways, for repositories you link to a Project.
• The Pet: a black cat on your desktop or docked in the window.
• Talking with the Pet, by voice that runs on your own computer.
• Today in the menu bar.
• A connector for Claude sessions, so a Claude session you direct can read and update Forward.
• Backups to a git repository of your own, and export, import and delete of everything from Settings.
• A second computer, over a private network you set up yourself.

What you bring yourself

• A Mac, for now. Nothing in Forward is meant to depend on macOS alone, and Windows may follow.
• Your own Anthropic API key, for the Coach. You pay Anthropic for what the Coach uses, up to a monthly Budget you set in Forward. Without a key, everything but the Coach still works.
• The Pet’s files. The animated cat is drawn with Live2D’s software and a Live2D sample model. Both belong to Live2D and are not in this repository. You download them from Live2D and accept Live2D’s terms yourself. Without them, the Pet is a simple stand-in drawing and everything else works.
• Your own Google client, for Google Calendar. This edition carries no Google client of Forward’s. You create one in your own Google Cloud project and enter it in Settings.
• A private git repository, if you want backups to leave your computer.
• A private network such as Tailscale, if you want to use Forward from a second computer.

The steps for all of this are in the repository’s README.

No account, and nothing sent to Forward

The Community edition has no Forward account and uses no Forward server. It sends nothing to the people who make Forward: no analytics, no telemetry, no crash reports.

Your data is kept on your own computer. It leaves only through services you connect yourself, with your own credentials:

• Anthropic, when the Coach files a line or proposes a day, under your own API key.
• GitHub, for the repositories you link.
• Your backup repository, if you name one.
• Google, for the calendars you choose, through your own Google client.

Keys and tokens are kept in a file only your user account can read. They are never put in a backup or an export.

Forward’s privacy policy is about the Free and Premium editions, which have an account and a server. It does not apply to software you build and run yourself, though the list above is the same list it gives for what leaves your computer.

How it relates to Free and Premium

All three editions share the same core: Today, the Coach, Areas, Goals, Projects, Pages and the Pet.

The Community edition is being finished first. Free and Premium are built on top of it afterwards. The parts that belong only to them, such as accounts, sync and the mobile apps, are not in this repository.