User guides

Altair has three domains that cover distinct parts of a life, plus one thing that runs underneath all three.

The three domains

Guidance is for the things you are working toward. Goals, initiatives, routines, quests, focus sessions. It is the answer to “what should I be doing today?” — without requiring the app to answer it for you.

Knowledge is for the things you are learning and remembering. Markdown notes, wiki-style links between them, automatic backlinks, and snapshots of notes as they change over time. It is the answer to “where did I write that thing?”

Tracking is for the resources a household runs on. Inventory across locations and categories, consumption and purchase logs, shopping lists that are tied to real items. It is the answer to “do we have any of that left?”

The connective tissue

Underneath all three domains is a shared relation system. Any entity can be linked to any other: a note can be attached to a quest, an inventory item can be linked to an initiative, a focus session can be tagged with a project name. Search works across all three domains in a single pass.

This matters in practice more than it sounds. A “rebuild the kitchen” initiative can hold the quests that track the work, the notes that capture decisions, and the inventory items you need to buy — all linkable, all findable from one search.

How to read these guides

Each guide is written as a tour: what the domain contains, how the pieces fit together, and the common workflows you’ll use day-to-day. They are not reference material — for that, the API reference and the specs in the GitHub repository are more useful.

Pick the domain that matches the thing you want to do first. They are designed to be read independently.