I'm building Zenta, a small set of offline tools to help you focus and stay present.
And Flow – a terminal app that helps you track deep work without distractions. It runs locally, keeps things simple, and protects your attention instead of just counting time.
After building Zenta https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44394929, a tiny CLI tool to pause and breathe, I realized I needed more than awareness — I needed to protect my attention. So I made Flow: a minimalist tool that helps you stay with one task at a time. Start a session, focus, take a mindful pause, and end it with intention.
No tracking. No metrics. Fully offline. Just one quiet boundary around your work.
Zenta helped me return to the present.
Flow helps me stay there.
Thank you again to everyone who shared feedback here — it helped a lot.
I took some time to reflect and wrote about why I built Zenta, and how mindfulness became part of my work: https://hieptran.me/posts/zenta/
Just wanted to share this in case it resonates with anyone else.
After building Zenta, a small tool to help me pause and breathe during work, I felt the need to write down the story behind it. It’s not just about the tool — it’s about what changed in me: how presence, breath, and simple philosophy became part of my life as a developer.
I’m sharing this in case it resonates with someone else on a similar path.
Honestly, I spent a whole day trying it, but it doesn't work for me. Zenta's way is simple: notice you're stuck in thoughts, return to your breath, then continue working with awareness.
Thank you both for this feedback!
You're right. I made a mistake by not testing thoroughly enough. I was being overly conservative based on assumptions rather than actual testing.
Your detailed feedback about $TERM values and real-world tmux usage is exactly what I needed. I should have tested more environments before making assumptions about terminal compatibility.
Thanks for keeping me honest and helping improve Zenta!
Great idea! Just fixed this. Now when you rename zenta to relax, all help messages automatically show "relax" instead of "zenta". Available in v0.3.2. Thanks!
Update: Just released v0.3.1 with Terminal.app compatibility fixed!
The tool now auto-detects your terminal and adapts gracefully. You'll see a beautiful progressive breathing animation that flows like:
Inhale: · → ○ → ●○○ → ●●●● (building up)
Exhale: ●●●● → ●○○ → ○ → · (releasing down)
Try the latest version - it should breathe beautifully on Terminal.app now.
Thanks for helping make mindfulness accessible to everyone!
Thanks for the feedback! You're right. I haven’t tested it on Terminal.app yet. It works well on iTerm2 and most Linux terminals, but I’ll review it on Terminal.app soon and update the tool or the README to reflect compatibility. Really appreciate you pointing that out.
And Flow – a terminal app that helps you track deep work without distractions. It runs locally, keeps things simple, and protects your attention instead of just counting time.
Made for developers who want calm, not noise.
GitHub:
- https://github.com/e6a5/zenta
- https://github.com/e6a5/flow