Command line usage¶
The following subsections give an overview of khard’s main features. You may
get general help and all available actions as well as detailed information on
all available options for the specific commands with the --help
options:
khard --help
khard command --help
Beware, that the order of the command line parameters matters.
Filtering contacts¶
Many subcommands of khard accept search terms to narrow the list of contacts that the command should work on. One can simply give some plain search terms on the command line or use a more sophisticated query language of khard.
The query language allows the user to search for contacts where a specific term
matches in a specific field of the contact. When searching for foo
there
might be two contacts that match, because one is called “Foo” and the other has
an email address containing “foo”:
$ khard list foo
Index Name Email
1 Bar bar@foo-company.com
2 Foo boss@example.com
But when searching for name:foo
or emails:foo
one would only find one
of these each time because “foo” only matches in these specific fields of the
contact.
The available fields are the same as in the YAML format for contacts (an empty
YAML template can be seen with khard template
). Case does not matter, all
filed names will be converted to lower case. For field names with spaces (like
“Formatted name”) the spaces have to be replaced with underscores (like in
formatted_name
). And the five name related fields “Prefix”, “First name”,
“Additional”, “Last name” and “Suffix” are not available, but a simple
name:
query is possible which will search in any name field (including
nicknames and formatted names).
Note
Typos in field names result in the query beeing considered as a general
search term. So email:foo
will search for “email:foo” in any field of
the contact, because the field is called “emails”.
Note
Nested field names like for the -F
option of the ls
subcommand
are currently not supported in the query syntax. You can only search with
the top level field names.
Show contacts¶
After you have created a new address book and you have synced it to your local machine, you can list all available contacts with the following command:
khard list
or if you have more than one address book and you want to filter the output:
khard list -a addressbook1,addressbook2
The resulting contact table only contains the first phone number and email address. If you want to view all contact details you can pick one from the list:
khard show
or search for it:
khard show name of contact
The parameter -a
from the examples above is always optional. It can
be given on all subcommands that select one or more contacts.
The search parameter searches in all data fields. Therefore you aren’t limited to the contact’s name but you also could for example search for a part of a phone number, email address or post address. However if you explicitly want to narrow your search down to some fields see the query language described in Filtering contacts.
Create contact¶
Add new contact with the following command:
khard new [-a "address book name"]
The template for the new contact opens in the text editor, which you can set in the config file. It follows the yaml syntax.
Alternatively you can create the contact from stdin:
echo "
First name : John
Last name : Smith
Email :
work : john.smith@example.org
Phone :
home : xxx 555 1234
Categories :
- cat1
- cat2
- cat3
" | khard new
or create from input template file:
khard new -i contact.yaml
You may get an empty contact template with the following command:
khard template
Assuming the user had configured the three supported private object “Jabber”,
“Skype”, and “Twitter” in their config, the template would look like
this
.
Per default khard creates vCards of version 3.0. If your other contact
applications support vCards of the more recent version 4.0, you may change this
with the option --vcard-version
. Example:
khard new --vcard-version=4.0
For a more permanent solution you may set the preferred_version parameter in
the vCard section of the khard config file (see the example config
file
for more details). But beware, that khard
cannot convert already existing contacts from version 3.0 to 4.0. Therefore
this setting is not applicable to the modify action.
Edit contacts¶
Use the following to modify the contact after successful creation:
khard edit [-a addr_name] [search terms [search terms ...]]
If you want to edit the contact elsewhere, you can export the filled contact template:
khard show --format=yaml -o contact.yaml [-a addr_name] [search terms [search terms ...]]
Edit the yaml file and re-import either through stdin:
cat contact.yaml | khard edit [-a addr_name] [search terms [search terms ...]]
or file name:
khard edit -i contact.yaml [-a addr_name] [search terms [search terms ...]]
If you want to merge contacts use the following to select a first and then a second contact:
khard merge [-a source_abook] [search terms [search terms ...]] [-A target_abook] [-t target_search_terms]
You will be launched into your merge_editor
(see khard.conf) where you
can merge all changes from the first selected contact onto the second. Once you
are finished, the first contact is deleted and the second one updated.
Copy or move contact:
khard copy [-a source_abook] [search terms [search terms ...]] [-A target_abook]
khard move [-a source_abook] [search terms [search terms ...]] [-A target_abook]
Remove contact:
khard remove [-a addr_name] [search terms [search terms ...]]