Backpacking Gear Tracker

A mouse-and-keyboard terminal app for tracking backpacking gear and building per-trip pack lists, built with Textual. Data lives in one JSON file next to the code, so the whole thing is portable — drop the folder in iCloud Drive / Dropbox / OneDrive and run it from any Mac or Windows machine.

Requirements

• Python 3.9+
• uv (recommended) — or plain pip

Running it

With uv (installs the right Python packages automatically, no manual venv):

uv run python main.py

Without uv:

pip install -r requirements.txt   # or: pip install textual
python3 main.py

To point at a data file somewhere else (e.g. a specific iCloud folder):

uv run python main.py --data "/Users/you/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/Gear/gear_data.json"

Files

• main.py — entry point.
• gear_tui.py — the Textual UI: screens, forms, tables, styling.
• gear_core.py — data model, JSON persistence, and Markdown rendering. Pure functions, no UI code — this is what generates the pack-list exports.
• gear_data.json — your data. Created automatically on first run if it doesn't exist, seeded with a few example items/trip (clearly labeled) so the format is obvious.
• pyproject.toml / uv.lock — project + locked dependencies for uv.
• requirements.txt — plain-pip fallback if you're not using uv.

Using the app

Everything is click-driven, with keyboard equivalents for everything:

• Click a table row to select it; click it again (or press Enter) to open/edit it. This two-step click mirrors how most file browsers work — a highlight first, then an activation — so you never open the wrong item by accident.
• Gear Inventory tab — search, add, edit, delete gear. The "Review Candidates" button filters to items rated low usefulness (<3/5) and over 8 oz — good first candidates to cut.
• Trips tab — click a trip to open its dashboard: live weight summary, a colored category-weight bar chart, and the assigned-gear list. Add or remove items right there; the same gear item can be on any number of trips without affecting the others. Every trip you've ever planned stays in the file — full history, nothing gets overwritten.
• Reports tab — export any trip's pack list, or the whole inventory, to a polished Markdown file (weight summary, category breakdown with a bar chart, heaviest items, review candidates, and a checkbox pack list) written to exports/.
• Esc cancels any dialog. q quits from the main screen.

Data safety

Every save writes to a temp file and atomically replaces the real one, so a crash or a synced-file conflict mid-write can't corrupt your data. Since it's still a flat JSON file with no locking, avoid editing it from two machines within the same iCloud/Dropbox sync cycle — if you do, you'll get a conflicted-copy file instead of a merge, and you'd need to reconcile by hand.

Backing it up

It's one JSON file — cp gear_data.json gear_data_backup_$(date +%F).json whenever you want a snapshot, or let iCloud/Dropbox/OneDrive version history handle it.