openspec-ui

Unofficial. openspec-ui is a community-built tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Fission-AI/OpenSpec. It consumes the openspec CLI over subprocess as a third-party client.

An interactive, keyboard-driven terminal UI for visualizing and managing your OpenSpec changes and specs.

openspec view dumps a static dashboard and exits. openspec-ui is the interactive version: browse changes and specs, glance at progress, see a kanban pipeline of your changes, open artifacts, edit them in $EDITOR, and create new changes — all from one terminal command.

Install & run

uvx openspec-ui

Run it from inside any directory containing an openspec/ root (or a subdirectory of one). Requires the openspec CLI on PATH.

Requires Python 3.10+ and Textual 1.0 or newer (installed automatically).

What it does

• Dashboard — an aligned table of changes (stage, name, progress, tasks, last modified) over headline counts of specs and of changes per stage. Specs are listed with their requirement counts.
• Kanban — a pipeline view of changes by stage, each column and card carrying that stage's colour, for at-a-glance status.
• Change detail — renders a change's artifacts (proposal.md, design.md, specs/**) as scrollable markdown with a navigable table of contents; ASCII diagrams and code blocks stay aligned in monospace. When an artifact resolves to several files, each gets its own tab.
• Tasks — a change's tasks.md rendered as its checklist, one section per heading with a done/total count. Read-only; edits go through $EDITOR.
• Spec browser — open a spec to read its overview and requirements, each expandable to reveal its scenarios.
• Filter — press / to narrow the changes and specs by name.
• Edit — press e to open the current artifact in $EDITOR; the view reloads from disk when the editor exits.
• New change — press n to create a change via openspec new change.
• Command palette — Ctrl+P for fuzzy-searchable actions, including jumping straight to any change or spec by name, and switching theme.
• Live refresh — open views re-read from disk as things change on disk; press p to pause.

Press ? at any time for the key bindings available on the current screen.

Screenshots

_{Screenshots show an example project, not this repository.}

Dashboard — changes in an aligned table with stage, progress and task counts, over headline counts per stage.

Kanban — k. Every column heading and card border carries its stage's colour, so the shape of the pipeline reads before any of the text does.

Change detail — enter on a change. Artifacts render as scrollable markdown with a table of contents; code blocks and ASCII diagrams keep their monospace alignment.

Tasks — the tasks.md checklist, one section per heading with its done/total count. Finished sections start collapsed so the eye lands on what is left. Read-only: edits go through $EDITOR.

Spec browser — enter on a spec. Requirements expand to reveal their scenarios, which is the only way a spec with thirty of them stays readable.

Command palette — Ctrl+P. Fuzzy-matched actions, plus every change and spec by name.

Filter — /. Narrows the changes and specs by name; escape clears it.

Light theme — all colour comes from the active Textual theme, so it follows your terminal.

Contributing

This project follows the OpenSpec spec-driven workflow (openspec/).

Git history uses Conventional Commits and conventional branch names:

• Branches: feat/<scope>, fix/<scope>, refactor/<scope>, chore/<scope>, …
• Commits: feat:, fix:, docs:, refactor:, chore:, … (with a scope when helpful, e.g. feat: add kanban view).
• Never commit directly to main. Work on a dedicated branch and open a pull request with the GitHub CLI (gh pr create), referencing the OpenSpec change name in the PR description.

For changes managed through OpenSpec, see openspec/config.yaml for the project context and per-operation guidance that the openspec skills follow.