Archive card

[tareqdayya]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Not being able to archive cards that are already done to hide them out of sight.

Describe the solution you'd like
Being able to archive a card to hide it, while still being able to search for it and find it if the need comes up.

Describe alternatives you've considered
Archiving a card instead of deleting it. In Asana, they call it "Mark as complete".

Additional context
Example from trello:

Screen.Recording.2025-04-04.at.12.41.26.PM.mov

[trobonox]

Thanks for your suggestion.
I will consider adding this option, but it is certainly not a priority for now. If there's any updates regarding this, I will keep you updated.

[tareqdayya]

I can push a PR if you can approve requirements. This is what I have in mind:

• User can archive a card via context menu
• Archived card has a distinctive visual look, and is hidden from the board.
• Archived card can be found via search.

Feel free to add more requirements that you feel are relevant. For a 1st iteration, I'm thinking these are simple enough and might just do the trick.

Preview:

Screen.Recording.2025-04-04.at.3.16.13.PM.mov

[trobonox]

That concept certainly looks interesting, thanks for sharing.
I'm not sure if discoverability of archived cards is ideal if they can only be found through search, but I'll think about it and let you know what I think about it. Potentially a menu with a simple list of archived cards which allows either permanently deleting or archiving them would help (it could be placed in the three dot menu of the board).
Other than that, I'm absolutely open to add this feature if you wish to contribute it.

[trobonox]

Also to add my two cents about this feature in general, I'm unsure about the usefulness of an archive feature. In my opinion cards don't hold that much information that it is a great deal to fully delete them once you don't need them anymore.

I'll take a while to think if I want to actually include this feature, because every new addition adds extra overhead and maintenance effort for me (I am the only primary maintainer of the app and it's getting increasingly harder to do so when the architecture is definitely not optimal).

[tareqdayya]

I'm not really opinionated about the discoverability, all I care about it is being able to hide the cards once they're no longer relevant. Feel free to set the requirements 📝 and I'll try my best to build it 🛠️. I guess you have something like this in mind?

Screen.Recording.2025-04-04.at.3.47.28.PM.mov

[tareqdayya]

No worries. Give it a thought, and let me know if you change your mind. For now, I'll just use a local build so I can use it.

I never delete cards as I still have to get back to them every now and then. Examples of why this happens are: "What was the rationale behind using this architecture", or "What a client wanted but we couldn't deliver due to what restrictions", or "What was the limitation that stopped us from building this feature and is it still a thing?". Cards are evidence of my work, they contain the conclusions of all of the time I put in researching a solution for a problem, they might not be relevant for a while (that's when they get archived), but it doesn't mean they will be irrelevant forever. I understand that a wiki is the better place for conclusions and not cards, but on smaller projects it's easier to use one tool instead of two

I also use it for time tracking; when I started working on a card and when I finished.

Given how most, if not all, major task/project managers have them (Jira, Trello, Asana, ..etc), I would assume this feature is in demand.

[diegopau]

I wanted to add that I do consider this feature useful (I also understand that this is not a priority) and some of my own ideas regarding this.

In general I prefer not to do delete data. Not just in this software, but as a general rule, I never get rid of data unless the software really struggles to handle it all... and that approach has saved many times when for whatever reason I need to recall something I did or why/how/when I did it. Also different people will have different uses for the boards/cards. For instance I use some of them not as ToDo or productivity tool but as a way of organizing different aspects of my life and I actually store data on them (meaning that they are not just tasks, but contain context and information that might be useful in the future too). I guess other people will have other uses.

So archiving is a way of keeping the boards tidy and useful while still retaining the data if in the future you need to check something specific..

About the discoverability I think that showing them only while searching is not enough. I think a sort of "show archived cards" checkbox could show all cards that are archived with a different background or icon or whatever to identify them over the other. They could just show in the column that they were when archived. Also when deleting a column there could be some warning like "You have X archived cards in this column that are not currently visible, deleting the column will delete the archived cards too."
If I remember correctly Trello (the similar software that I used the most in the past) also let you archive whole columns, but that's a different (if somehow related) topic.

[trobonox]

Thanks for your input. I'll take some more time for consideration, but if we can implement this without adding too much maintenance overhead, we could go for it (although not in the next release which I'm trying to get out ASAP, but rather the one after which will probably take quite a while to release).