First run

When to read this. You've never used condash. You want to get to a working dashboard on your machine in one sitting, with a tree of realistic items to poke at before you commit to building your own.

By the end, you'll have condash installed, running against the bundled conception-demo tree, and the Projects, Code, Knowledge, and History tabs will all render with content.

1. Install condash

The fastest path is a prebuilt installer from the GitHub Releases page. Each release ships a per-OS bundle:

Platform	Artifact
Linux	condash_<version>_amd64.AppImage or condash_<version>_amd64.deb
macOS	condash_<version>_<arch>.dmg
Windows	condash_<version>_x64_en-US.msi

The builds are unsigned — your OS will ask you to confirm once on first launch. See Install the desktop app for the per-platform bypass.

If you'd rather build from source, clone the repo and run:

make setup                 # one-off, installs cargo-tauri into the rustup toolchain
make frontend              # bundle the dashboard JS/CSS
make build                 # produce the platform installer under src-tauri/target/release/bundle/

That's the same pipeline CI uses. You'll need a Rust toolchain and, on Linux, the usual WebKitGTK + libappindicator system packages.

2. Fetch the demo tree

The condash repo ships a realistic demo tree at examples/conception-demo/. It has nine items, all six statuses, a knowledge tree, and two deliverable PDFs — enough for every feature in the rest of the tutorials to have something to act on.

Copy it into a working location:

mkdir -p ~/conception-demo
curl -fsSL https://codeload.github.com/vcoeur/condash/tar.gz/main \
  | tar -xz --strip-components=2 -C ~/conception-demo \
      condash-main/examples/conception-demo

Inspect what you got:

~/conception-demo/
├── README.md
├── config/
│   ├── preferences.yml
│   └── repositories.yml
├── projects/
│   ├── 2026-03/         # items created last month (2 done)
│   └── 2026-04/         # 7 items created this month (3 now, 1 review, 1 soon, 1 later, 1 backlog)
└── knowledge/
    ├── conventions.md
    ├── internal/
    └── topics/

Everything is plain Markdown. Open projects/2026-04/2026-04-02-fuzzy-search-v2/README.md in your editor to see the header format.

3. Point condash at the tree

condash reads the conception tree location from the CONDASH_CONCEPTION_PATH environment variable. Default is $HOME/src/vcoeur/conception.

The quickest way to try the demo tree for a single run is:

CONDASH_CONCEPTION_PATH=~/conception-demo condash

To make it persistent, export the variable from your shell's rc file (~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc, or the equivalent). Or, once the window is open, click the gear icon in the dashboard header and set the path in the General tab — that writes it to ~/conception-demo/config/preferences.yml for next time.

4. Launch

condash

Tauri opens a native desktop window on your OS's webview and points it at the local dashboard. You should see this:

The header shows four top-level tabs with counts: Projects (9), Code (3), Knowledge (8), History (9). Under Projects, the sub-tabs are Current / Next / Backlog / Done. The demo tree was built so every bucket has something in it.

5. Walk around

Take two minutes to click through:

• Current — 3 items with status now (one of each kind: document, incident, project) and 1 item with status review. Click the fuzzy-search-v2 row; the card expands, showing the README on the left and a step list on the right with all four marker states ([x], [~], [ ], [-]).
• Next — the soon bucket. One project (json-export).
• Backlog — one project, parked.
• Done — two archived items from the previous month.
• Code — three repos: condash scanned workspace_path: /tmp/conception-demo-workspace from config/repositories.yml and found one .git/ per entry. (If the Code tab shows 0, the workspace path on your machine doesn't exist yet — we'll set that up properly in Your first project.)
• Knowledge — the knowledge/ tree rendered as an explorer: conventions.md at the root, Internal and Topics folders with index files.
• History — full-text search across every item + note. Type fuzzy to see ranked matches.

Click the gear icon in the top right to see the Configuration modal with three tabs — General / Repositories / Preferences. The General tab holds the conception path and a few per-machine defaults; the other two map directly to conception-demo/config/repositories.yml and conception-demo/config/preferences.yml (tree-versioned). You'll use this modal in the next tutorial.

6. Close the window

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

What you just learned

• Installing condash is either a one-click installer from GitHub Releases or three make targets from source.
• CONDASH_CONCEPTION_PATH plus the gear modal is the whole setup flow. The path is the only thing you must set.
• The dashboard renders the files as-is on every page load. There's no database, no watcher, no cache.
• The tree carries two YAML config files in config/ — one team-shared (repositories.yml), one per-machine (preferences.yml). We'll dig into that split in Configure the conception path.

Next

Your first project → — create a real item, wire its steps, link it to another item, add a note.