Lenses

You live in more than one world: a job, a personal life, a side project, a client. Lenses let you name those worlds and look at Rymi through one of them at a time, so a focused work session shows only work and nothing else clamours for attention.

A lens is a view, not a folder. Focusing one narrows what is visible. It moves nothing, hides nothing permanently, and creates no second place for anything to live. There is still exactly one Inbox, one Today, one Backlog, because you live one day. When no lens is focused you are in Everything, which is Rymi exactly as it is without the feature.

Lenses are a Mac feature. On iPhone and iPad you always see Everything, and any lenses you set on the Mac are kept safe and untouched.

Making your first lens

You do not turn lenses on. They appear the moment you create one, and until then there is no trace of them.

The most natural place to start is a project. Open a project and, under its title, you will see a quiet No lens control. Click it, choose New lens…, and type a name like “Work”. That project, and every task in it, now belongs to the Work lens. You can also give a loose task (a task with no project) its own lens from its detail panel.

A lens is only a name. There are no colours, icons, or descriptions to fill in.

Focusing a lens

Once a lens exists, a scope switcher appears at the very top of the sidebar. It reads Everything at rest. Click it (or press L) to open the list, then pick a lens to focus it.

When you focus a lens:

• A slim lens bar appears at the top of the pane, naming the lens. This is how you can tell a focused view from Everything at a glance.
• Inbox, Today, Backlog, and the Archive narrow to only that lens’s tasks. The whole point is focus, so anything in another lens - or with no lens yet - steps out of the way. Nothing is lost: on Today, the lens bar tells you how many commitments are out of view, and a task you capture while focused picks up that lens automatically.
• The sidebar’s project list shortens to that lens’s projects.

To return, click ← Everything in the lens bar, or choose Everything in the switcher. Focus is per-device and lasts for the day - it resets to Everything each morning, and the morning planning ritual always runs in Everything.

Everything but one world

Sometimes you want the opposite of focus. It’s the weekend and you want to see your whole life except Work. Open the lens list and flip the Inverse toggle at the top (or press ⌥L). The list turns into checkboxes: tick the worlds to hide, then press Apply. The switcher and lens bar now read “Everything but Work”.

This is the true opposite of focusing. Focusing Work shows only Work; excluding Work shows everything that is not Work - every other lens and anything with no lens yet. You can hide more than one world at a time (“Everything but Work, Rymi”), and the same honest edges apply: on Today, the lens bar still tells you how many commitments are tucked out of view. Return to your whole life the same way - ← Everything in the bar.

How a task gets its lens

• A task in a project takes that project’s lens automatically. You do not set it per task - change it on the project, and every task follows.
• A loose task (no project) carries its own lens, which you set in its detail panel.
• A task with no lens is unassigned, which is a perfectly normal state. It shows in Everything, and steps out of view while you’re focused on a lens - until you give it one.

When you capture a task while focused on a lens, it picks up that lens by default - a quiet line above the title shows which one. Assign a project and the project’s lens takes over.

Lenses never hide your commitments

Rymi will not let a lens quietly shrink your day. On Today, the lens bar tells you how many of today’s commitments belong to other lenses (“3 commitments out of view”). And if you focus a lens where nothing is planned but your day is not actually empty, Rymi says so plainly - “Today is not empty” - rather than pretending you have nothing on.

Search always looks across Everything, so a lens can never make a task unfindable. Opening a result that lives in another world simply drops you back to Everything.

Renaming and removing lenses

Everything lives in the lens list - there is no settings page. Hover a lens in the list to rename it (the change applies everywhere at once) or remove it. Removing a lens is safe: its projects and tasks stay exactly where they are, just unassigned. Nothing is deleted.

Lenses are private

On a shared project, your lenses are yours alone. You might file a shared project under “Work” while a collaborator files the same project under “Side hustle”, and neither of you ever sees the other’s choice. Lenses are never social.