aardvark-jd

A PARA + Johnny Decimal filing and indexing system, backed by SQLite. Installs as the aardvark-jd package; the command-line tool itself is called aardvark.

Documentation for aardvark is hosted by Read the Docs (development version and main version). The code lives on github. Please report any issues you find here. If you want to contribute, pull requests are welcomed!

Features

• init a PARA + Johnny Decimal root folder structure, indexed in a local SQLite database
• add-area / add-category / add-id to grow the Johnny Decimal index under Areas or Resources, with auto-numbering
• new-project to spin up a new (optionally templated) project folder under Projects
• search the index by keyword or phrase
• every non-ID folder is automatically suffixed with a relevant emoji

Installation

The easiest way to install aardvark is to use conda:

conda create -n aardvark-jd python=3.14 pip aardvark-jd -c conda-forge
conda activate aardvark-jd

To upgrade to the latest version of aardvark use the command:

conda upgrade aardvark-jd -c conda-forge

It is also possible to install via pip if required:

pip install aardvark-jd

Or you can clone the github repo and install from a local version of the code:

git clone git@github.com:thespacedoctor/aardvark-jd.git
cd aardvark-jd
python setup.py install

To check installation was successful run aardvark -v. This should return the version number of the install.

Initialising a system

Give your system a name and a parent folder to live in:

aardvark init "My Life" ~/

This builds the full PARA + Johnny Decimal folder tree, creates the aardvark.db SQLite index, and records the system as active in your user settings file at ~/.config/aardvark/aardvark.yaml (created automatically on first run, populated with aardvark's default settings).

You are now ready to start using aardvark - see the quickstart for the full command reference.