Who makes it, and how it is built
A small team that lives in agents and terminals all day, building the one it wanted. The parts of that worth knowing before you trust a program with your shell.
Shifton Inc
vobuda is made by Shifton Inc, the team behind shifton.com, shift management software used in dozens of countries, and rolchat.com, its own customer communications platform. The terminal came out of that work rather than out of a market study: a team that spends the working day handing tasks to agents and reading what comes back, building the window it kept wishing existed.
The first build people outside the team could install arrived six days after the first window opened. It already had blocks that split and dragged between tabs with their shells running, the agent control bar, the system monitor with skins, a file open beside the shell, dictation and reading aloud, the command line, workspaces, the quake window and forty languages with a guide in each.
Free, and closed
The program costs nothing, for your work and your business alike. There is no trial, no paid tier, no seat count and no account. Its source is not published: what is handed out is the build, and the public repository carries the readme, the changelog, the licence and the figures on this site.
What the licence does not allow is handing the program on: distributing a copy, selling it, offering it as a service, taking it apart or changing it, using its name, or removing the parts of the interface that mention the author's other products. If somebody else wants it, point them here, because it is free for them too.
The licence is written to be read rather than to be survived. If you need something it does not give you, ask. The answer is often yes.
The libraries this is built on are other people's, given away under their own terms. The full list with every licence text ships inside the program, under What vobuda is built on in its own menu.
How it is checked before it ships
The point is not the numbers. It is that when something breaks on your machine, the fix arrives with the check that stops it coming back.
Every fault has an id, and a check that names it
Every fault the program has ever had is written down with an identifier, and a check names that identifier. 443 of them today, and a script refuses a contract that nobody checks, so the count cannot quietly drift apart from the tests.
More than 1,400 automated checks
In five ladders: pure functions, the Rust core, the command line, a live window driven by its own state, and a run driven by the mouse with screenshots. The last two have to pass twice in a row, which is the only way to know a check is not living on what the run before it left behind.
The interface tests drive the real program
Through its own command line rather than a private hook. That is why the command line can be trusted: it is not a side door, it is the road every check takes.
Guards on the documents too
One counts the numbers in the documents against the repository. One reddens when the program changes and the documents do not. One holds forty translations of the guide to the English one by shape. One insists every action is pressed by a check somewhere.
Removals reach into your files
What a removal leaves in a person's files is part of the removal. A retired look left its arrangement behind; a retired reading left a panel drawing zero; a retired shape would have left a skin with nothing in it. Each of those is now migrated rather than abandoned.
Things that were built and then withdrawn
A secrets store was built, worked as designed, and went anyway: the value lived in the keychain and vobuda knew only the name, but this is a program written for people who have never thought about where a key is kept, and the safest store is the one we do not offer.
What leaves your machine
| What | Where it goes |
|---|---|
| Your speech | Recognised on the machine. A language that would need the network is refused rather than quietly sent |
| Your files, settings and history | Never leave. No account, no sync, no server of ours |
| Faults | Recorded where they happen, scrubbed before they are written, and sent nowhere until you turn it on |
| Once a day | One request asking whether a newer version exists |
| The address panel | While on screen, one request every ten minutes asking what address the internet sees |
No analytics, no identifier, no usage report. Not as a setting you can switch off, but as code that does not exist.
About the program and the people
Is vobuda open source?
No. It is free of charge and closed. The build is what is handed out; the source is not published. The public repository holds the readme, the changelog, the licence and the figures used on this site.
Will it stay free?
Yes. There is no paid tier planned and no account to attach one to. It exists because the team wanted it to exist.
Who is behind it?
Shifton Inc, the company behind shifton.com and rolchat.com.
Where do I report a bug or ask for something?
The issues page on the public repository, which is linked from the contact page. Every fault that gets fixed gets an identifier and a check named after it.
Why is there no Linux build yet?
Because macOS is what shipped, and shipping a second platform badly is worse than shipping it later. Linux and Windows are next, and there is no date to give.