Stride

A native macOS app for tracking habits and home projects. Built for my own use, because the tools I tried all assumed the thing you want to repeat happens on a weekday — and most of what I actually needed to track happens every 90 days.

Local-first. Everything lives in JSON files on disk, no account, no sync, no server.

Not actively maintained. Written in April 2026 and used since; it does what I needed, so I stopped. Published as-is rather than presented as an ongoing project.

What it does

Habits with three completion shapes, because "did you do it" is not always a yes/no question:

• checkbox — did it or didn't
• tally — count toward a target (glasses of water, sets)
• checklist — named subtasks that complete individually

Two scheduling models:

• Weekly — pick the days it recurs
• Interval — every N days from a start date

The interval mode is why this exists. Furnace filters, gutter clearing, water-heater flushes, and deck sealing are all "every N months" tasks that a weekday-based scheduler cannot represent without lying about them.

Projects group related work with per-project task lists and archiving. Quick tasks cover one-offs that don't belong to a project, with optional recurrence by day/week/month. Workspaces split personal from work so the morning view isn't a blend of "replace furnace filter" and "prep 1:1 notes." Time-of-day buckets (Before Work / Morning / Afternoon / Night / All Day) organize the daily view.

Streaks, longest-streak, and completion rate are computed per habit.

Structure

Stride/
  Models/          Habit, Project, QuickTask, HabitCompletion, Workspace,
                   TimeCategory, DayOfWeek — all Codable value types
  Services/
    HabitStore     @Observable store; scheduling, streaks, completion state
    StorageService JSON persistence to Application Support, atomic writes
  Views/
    Today/         daily view grouped by time category
    Projects/      project detail and completed-project history
    Unassigned/    tasks with no project
    Sidebar/       navigation and workspace switching
    Components/    confetti, completion-note sheet
project.yml        XcodeGen spec (no .xcodeproj in the repo)

Two things worth pointing at

Schema-compatible decoding. Habit and Project have hand-written init(from:) decoders that use decodeIfPresent(...) ?? default for every field added after the first version. Adding workspaces and sort ordering later would otherwise have made every existing habits.json unreadable. Data written by an older build still loads.

Notes as a completion requirement. A habit can set requiresNote, which forces a short note when you mark it done. Useful for anything where the result matters more than the checkmark — a project step you want a record of, not just a tick.

Building it

Requires macOS 14+, Xcode with Swift 6, and XcodeGen.

brew install xcodegen
xcodegen generate
open Stride.xcodeproj

The project file is generated rather than committed, so project.yml is the source of truth for build settings. Change the DEVELOPMENT_TEAM value there to your own before signing.

Data

Stored at ~/Library/Application Support/Stride/ as four JSON files — habits.json, completions.json, quicktasks.json, projects.json. Pretty-printed with sorted keys, so they diff cleanly and can be edited by hand or backed up with anything that copies files.