// the take
friends is a Ruby command-line tool for tracking time spent with people you care about: you log activities and notes against friends, locations, and tags in a single markdown file, and it can suggest who to reach out to. It's for people who want a lightweight personal CRM for relationships without a database or app, and who are comfortable living in a terminal.
Storage is one plain markdown file with a documented, human-readable format, so you can read, diff, grep, or hand-edit it, and sync it across machines with Dropbox/Drive with zero infrastructure. The name-matching is genuinely clever: it resolves nicknames, first initials, and disambiguates between multiple friends sharing a first name. Natural-language date parsing ('last Monday') removes friction from the main add-activity workflow. The list/graph commands have enough filter flags (--with, --tagged, --in, --since) that combined with grep they cover most ad-hoc queries without needing a real query language.
Last push was mid-2021, so this is effectively unmaintained despite the README's 'very much alive' claim linking to a years-old issue — don't expect fixes for newer Ruby version incompatibilities. The whole file gets re-parsed and rewritten on every add/edit/clean operation, so there's no locking: syncing via Dropbox and editing from two machines close together will clobber one side's changes with no merge. The fuzzy friend-matching that's a strength in the README is also a risk — ambiguous matches on initials or partial names can silently attribute an activity to the wrong person with no confirmation step. It's terminal-only with no mobile or web client, which cuts against the point of a tool meant to prompt frequent, casual logging.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →