Command line

Ritual, from a terminal.

Every copy of Ritual for Mac carries a ritual command inside it. It reads and writes the same tasks as the app and your iPhone, so anything you add from a terminal is on your phone by the time you pick it up.

Installing it

Open Ritual for Mac, go to Settings, and press Install Command Line Tool. That links the command somewhere your shell can find it and tells you if anything else is needed.

It installs a link rather than a copy, which is the part that matters: when Ritual updates itself, the command updates with it. A copied binary would quietly fall behind the app and then fail to read a database the app had already migrated.

If you would rather do it by hand, the command lives at Ritual.app/Contents/Helpers/ritual and any link to it works.

What it looks like

# what's on today
ritual

# capture something, scheduled for tonight
ritual add "book the physio" --evening

# file it to a project with a deadline
ritual add "send Priya the file" --today --project Work --deadline 2026-09-01

# tick it off
ritual complete <id>

# find that thing you half-remember
ritual search milk

# check a habit in
ritual checkin "morning run"

Every command takes --json, which is what makes it worth wiring into something else: a shell alias, a cron job, a keyboard launcher, a script that adds a task when a build fails.

The commands

Command	What it does
`ritual list`	What's on today. The default, so bare `ritual` does it.
`ritual add`	Create a task, optionally scheduled, tagged or filed to a project.
`ritual show`	One task in full, including its notes and checklist.
`ritual update`	Edit a task's fields.
`ritual schedule`	Move a task to a day, or back to the Inbox.
`ritual complete`	Tick a task off.
`ritual uncomplete`	Put a completed task back on the list.
`ritual delete`	Soft-delete a task — a tombstone that syncs, not a hole.
`ritual search`	Search every task by title and notes.
`ritual projects`	List projects.
`ritual tags`	List tags.
`ritual habits`	Today's habits: routine slots and standalone ones.
`ritual checkin`	Check a habit in for today.

ritual help <command> has the full set of options for any of them.

Two things worth knowing

It reads your local store. Ritual for Mac needs to be installed and to have run once, because that is what creates the database the command reads. It works offline and asks nothing of the network.

Keep them in step. The app and the command share one database, so after an update that changes the data format they need to be the same build. The Settings link keeps that true by itself; a hand-copied binary will not. Settings shows the data format both are on if you ever need to check.

Getting it

The command comes with Ritual for Mac, which is a free direct download. There is nothing else to install and nothing to sign in to — Ritual Cloud is a separate, optional thing for connecting Ritual to an assistant over MCP.