Your first day in heap.

A ten-minute walkthrough of the whole app. heap. is one native binary — no account, no server, no browser. Everything you create lives on your machine.

Keyboard-first throughout. The full shortcut list is in HOTKEYS.md; the essentials appear inline below.

1. Launch & the layout

On first run heap. seeds an Example profile so nothing is empty. The window has three regions: the side rail (view switcher, left), the main view (center), and the calendar + people column (right).

Switch views with Ctrl+1…8, in side-rail order: Board, Timeline, Week, Month, Archive, Docs, Notes, Settings. Hover a rail icon to see its shortcut.

2. Capture a task in under two seconds

Press Ctrl+Shift+Space for Quick-capture, type a line, hit Enter. The popup previews what it parsed (date chip, title) before you commit.

It works from any app. When heap. is not the focused window, the hotkey brings up only the capture line, over whatever you are working in. The main window stays minimized, in the tray or behind your editor. Esc puts it away. Clicking elsewhere does too, except for a quick note that already has text in it: that one waits for Enter or Esc. Ctrl+Shift+N does the same for a quick note.

After saving, heap. tells you what it made: a system notification when you captured from another app, a toast when heap. was in front. For example:

Meeting added to the calendar
“call with @lena”
Tomorrow, Thu 1 Oct, 16:00–16:30
With: Lena
Note: pricing
Also a task in “To Do”

Clicking the notification opens the task.

Quick-capture syntax

Everything is optional and order-independent, in English and Russian.

What it is

When

Return adds the task and closes; Ctrl+Return adds it and stays open for the next one. A line that is only a date (tomorrow) says so instead of doing nothing.

Where it lands

A meeting also creates a task linked to it. Russian words match in any case: созвона, встрече and синке work as well as созвон, встреча and синк.

Other date forms: friday, пятница, May 22, 22.05, 14:00, 12:00-13:00.

Prefer a full form? Ctrl+N opens the task editor with every field.

3. Work the board

• Drag cards between status columns; the color of each column is editable.
• Cards show a priority chip (P0–P3), a branch tag, a deadline, and a scheduled-time pill when a focus block exists.
• Multi-select: Ctrl+A selects everything visible; then move, archive, or Del (undoable for 5 s). Esc clears the selection.
• Toggle Archived in the filter bar to see auto-archived done tasks.

4. See it by time

• Timeline (Ctrl+2) buckets tasks into overdue / today / tomorrow / this week / later, with a show-done toggle.
• Week (Ctrl+3) is a 7-day grid — drag, resize, and move events across days; all-day deadline chips sit on top.
• The day calendar (right column) lets you drag on empty space to create an event, resize from either edge, and drop a task onto it to schedule a focus block. Overlapping events sit side-by-side. Week, Month and Settings open with the column folded, since they are a calendar or have nothing to plan against; Ctrl+\ brings it back.

5. Docs & Notes

• Docs (Ctrl+6): sections, custom fields, a syntax-highlighted snippet editor, and contact cards.

• Notes (Ctrl+7): a per-profile markdown canvas with @people and #ticket autocomplete. Ctrl+Shift+N appends a quick note from anywhere.

  Write in full markdown: headings, nested lists, task lists, tables, fenced code with syntax highlighting, block quotes, footnotes, and callouts such as > [!WARNING] Mind the migration. Ctrl+Shift+M cycles edit → split → preview; in split the two panes scroll together, clicking a rendered block puts the cursor on the line that produced it, and ticking a checkbox in the preview rewrites exactly one character of the source — undoable like any other edit. The formatting keys are in HOTKEYS.md.

  Searching (Ctrl+K) finds notes by section rather than as one blob, so a hit reads as Notes › Release › Windows and opens at that heading.

  Images in a note render from disk. A remote image (https://…) is shown as a link you can choose to follow rather than being fetched, because heap makes no network requests you did not ask for.

6. Profiles

A profile is a feature-scoped workspace: its own tasks, people, statuses, docs and notes. Create one from the profile pill in the top bar, cycle with Ctrl+] / Ctrl+[, and export the active profile to Markdown with Ctrl+Shift+E. Full JSON import/export lives in Settings → Data — see DATA.md.

7. The search box is a query box

Ctrl+F focuses the header search. Typing words searches the obvious things — title, id, description, branch, and for a mirrored issue also its tracker key, labels, assignee, project and milestone. Typing field:value filters instead:

Clauses combine with AND, and mix freely with ordinary words: status:blocked priority:P0 login is the blocked P0 tasks whose text mentions login. Dates understand what the task editor understands, so deadline:<friday and deadline:<2026-09-24 are both fine. A typo — an unknown field, column or priority, an unreadable date — drops that clause rather than emptying the board, and the search box shows a ? badge naming what it could not read. The magnifier turns accent-coloured when what you typed is being read as a query.

This works the same on the board, the timeline, the week and month calendars and the archive.

8. Command palette & tweaks

• Ctrl+K (or Ctrl+P) — fuzzy search across tasks, docs, snippets, contacts, people and profiles. Enter jumps straight to the item.
• Ctrl+, — Tweaks: theme, density, accent, reduced motion, high contrast.
• Ctrl+/ — rebind any shortcut inline.

9. It nudges you

A background tick (every 60 s) auto-archives long-done tasks, flags tasks that have been blocked too long, and fires deadline, meeting and standup reminders through the system tray. During quiet hours (Settings → Notifications) a reminder is held and delivered when the quiet window ends; a meeting or the standup is an appointment and still reminds. A reminder is never repeated, not even after a restart.

That’s the whole surface. Next: skim HOTKEYS.md once, then just live in Quick-capture.