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CLI

condash ships two binaries. Neither takes subcommands or flags — everything that used to live behind a flag is now either an environment variable or a line in settings.yaml / configuration.yml.

At a glance

Binary What it does
condash Open the Tauri desktop window against the current conception tree
condash-serve Run the HTTP server headless — no webview, no GUI deps

condash

The main binary. Packaged into the per-OS installer on the releases page; also produced by make build from source.

condash

That's it — no arguments. The binary boots an embedded axum HTTP server on a free loopback port, then opens a Tauri window pointing at it. On Linux the window uses WebKitGTK; on macOS, WKWebView; on Windows, WebView2.

Closing the window exits the process. Relaunch whenever you want to come back — state lives in the Markdown files, not in the app.

condash-serve

A developer-oriented binary that runs the same HTTP server without opening a window. Produced by cargo build -p condash --bin condash-serve, or make serve when iterating.

condash-serve

Prints the bound URL (e.g. http://127.0.0.1:43217) and keeps running until you Ctrl+C. Open the URL in your normal browser. Without CONDASH_PORT, the OS assigns any free port — the URL varies across launches.

Reasons to use condash-serve:

  • Headless host. No DISPLAY, no webview libs, still want the dashboard.
  • Automation. Playwright / Chromium DevTools drive a plain HTTP URL more cleanly than a Tauri-wrapped one.
  • Frontend iteration. Combine with CONDASH_ASSET_DIR=frontend/ to serve the source bundle from disk instead of the embedded copy, then rebuild with make frontend in another shell and hard-refresh the browser.

Configuration

Neither binary reads flags. Configuration lives in three layers (see Config files for the full schema):

  1. Environment variables — three of them, all prefixed CONDASH_:
Variable Meaning
CONDASH_CONCEPTION_PATH Absolute path to the conception tree to render. Overrides conception_path in settings.yaml.
CONDASH_ASSET_DIR Override the embedded dashboard bundle with a live directory on disk. Dev-only.
CONDASH_PORT Pin the listen port of condash-serve. Unset → any free port.

See Environment variables for the full list.

  1. settings.yaml at ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-~/.config}/condash/settings.yaml — per-user, per-machine. Holds conception_path plus the three blocks that naturally differ per machine: terminal, pdf_viewer, open_with.
  2. configuration.yml at <conception_path>/configuration.yml — per-tree, versioned in git. Holds workspace_path, worktrees_path, repositories (incl. run: / force_stop:). Edit it by hand or through the gear icon in the dashboard header (plain-text YAML editor).

What's not in the CLI

  • Creating items — the dashboard doesn't create items, and neither does the CLI. Use your editor, or the management skill.
  • Listing or searching items — use the History tab in the dashboard, or grep over the tree.
  • A server mode for multiple users — condash is single-user. If you want multi-user, something else is the right tool.