Quick Start¶

This page walks through the first use of filecard from an empty vault. It assumes filecard init has already been completed.

Launch the interface¶

filecard

The GnuPG agent will prompt for your passphrase once and cache it. You are now in the list view. The vault is empty.

Create a card¶

Press n. A prompt appears at the bottom:

New card name:

Type a name and press Enter. The edit view opens immediately on the new card, positioned on tab 1:Identity.

Fill in the Identity tab¶

The cursor is on the name field. Press j to move to aliases. Press Enter on any field to edit it in place.

For aliases, type alternate names separated by commas:

Lawrence Smith, The Minister

For tags:

politician, vip

Press Enter to confirm each field. Press Esc to cancel an edit without saving.

Add facts¶

Press 2 to switch to the Facts tab.

The standard fields are listed: occupation, organisation, born, languages, location, nationality. Press Enter on a field to fill it in. Blank input leaves the field unchanged.

occupation    Minister of Foreign Affairs
organisation  Expansionist Party
born          2040

To add a fact that is not in the standard list, move to + add custom fact and press Enter, or press a from anywhere in the tab. You will be prompted for a key, then a value:

key    home planet
value  Earth

Add a relationship¶

Press 3 to switch to the Relations tab. Press a to add a relation.

A picker opens listing standard roles. Type to filter, use j/k to move, press Enter to select:

> aid
  aide

A second picker lists existing cards. Select one, or type a name that has no card yet using the use: <query> row at the bottom.

Log an event¶

Press 4 to switch to the Events tab. Press a.

A picker opens for the event type. Select meeting. A prompt appears at the bottom:

[meeting] note:

Type the note and press Enter:

Met at the spaceport.

The event is saved with the current timestamp.

Add a note¶

Press 5 to switch to the Notes tab. Press a. Type a note and press Enter:

Never mention the 2115 election in his presence.

The note is stored with today's date.

Return to the list view¶

Press Esc. The list view shows the card. The tags and organisation columns are populated.

Search for a card¶

Press /. The hint bar changes to show a live query prompt. Type characters to filter the list in real time:

/bonfrt

The list narrows to matching cards. Press Enter to open the highlighted card, or Esc to exit search mode.

Log an event from the shell¶

You can append an event without opening the interface:

filecard log "Bonforte" -m "Called ahead of the Martian visit." -t call

The name is resolved by fuzzy match. If the match is ambiguous, filecard prints candidates and exits.

Export a card¶

From the list view, move to the card and press x. The card is written to a plain text file:

Exported → john-bonforte.txt

From the shell:

filecard export "Bonforte"
filecard export "Bonforte" -o /tmp/bonforte.txt

Quit¶

Press q in the list view. The vault is re-encrypted and a timestamped backup is written to ~/.local/share/filecard/backups/ before exit.