parc 0.1
Getting started · §02

Quick start

Five minutes from zero to a working vault with a few captured thoughts.

# 1. Create a vault

A vault is just a .parc/ directory. You can have one global vault for personal notes and per-project vaults that travel with the code.

# Project-local vault — created in the current directory
parc init

# Global vault — created at ~/.parc/
parc init --global

parc finds your vault by walking up from the current directory, then falling back to ~/.parc/. Inside a project-local vault, use parc -g or parc --global to write to the global vault instead.

# 2. Capture a thought

The shortest command in parc captures a note in one keystroke:

parc + "Look into connection pooling for the read replicas"

+ is the alias for parc capture: a single-line input becomes the title; multi-line input puts the first line in the title and the rest in the body. It always creates a note and never opens an editor.

For typed creation with editor + schema validation use the type aliases:

parc n "Look into connection pooling"   # = parc new note
parc --global n "Book personal tax appointment"

n is a built-in alias for new note. The same shorthand works for the other types: t for todo, d for decision, r for risk, i for idea. Any captured note can be promoted later — parc promote 01JQ7V todo --priority high rewrites it as a todo while keeping its body, tags, and links.

# 3. Add structured fragments

# Todo with priority, due date, and a tag
parc t "Upgrade auth library" --priority high --due friday --tag security

# Decision with a tag
parc d "Use Postgres for the event store" --tag infrastructure

# Risk with likelihood and impact
parc r "Token leak through logs" --likelihood medium --impact high
# Open todos
parc list todo --status open

# Anything tagged with backend that's due this week
parc search '#backend due:this-week'

# Open high-priority todos
parc search 'type:todo status:open priority:high'

# 5. Show and edit

Every fragment has a ULID identifier. You can refer to it by any unique prefix.

parc show 01JQ7V          # show a fragment
parc edit 01JQ7V          # open it in $EDITOR
parc set 01JQ7V status done

# 6. Bring it back to the surface

parc today prints a daily digest — what you've touched, what's due, what's open and high priority. Bare parc in a terminal opens the TUI; piped or redirected, it falls back to the same digest.

parc today                # daily digest
parc due overdue          # missed due dates
parc stale --days 14      # open work that's gone quiet
parc review               # weekly multi-section recap

See Resurfacing for the full set.

# Where to next