Overview

What it is

Alexandria is a personal library system for a single person. It indexes the media and documents already sitting on your disk, records what it finds in a local catalog, and gives you one application to browse, play, read, edit, and organise all of it.

Two properties shape everything else about it:

It is single-user. One owner, one account. There is no sharing, no second profile, no roles, and no multi-tenancy anywhere in the design.

It does not own your files. Alexandria stores metadata and a path — never your file’s contents. It never re-encodes, transcodes, duplicates, or relocates a file, and it removes one from disk only when you explicitly ask it to.

What it handles

What you can do with it

• Register one or more library folders and run indexing and re-scans from the interface.
• Browse the catalog by file type, and search, filter, and sort across all of it.
• Play video with full screen, seeking, subtitle tracks, and audio tracks.
• Play audio in a persistent player, with a disc, vinyl, or tape animation that turns while an album or artist plays and stops on pause.
• View PDFs, e-books, comic books, images, saved HTML, and rendered Markdown.
• Edit Markdown and text files in place, with a live preview.
• Edit music and video metadata, and rename any file.
• Group files and bookmarks into collections.
• Track movies and series in watchlists, with per-episode progress.
• Track books and comics in reading lists, with per-issue progress.
• Soft-delete, restore, and purge catalog records, and separately purge a file from disk.
• Register the owner account, log in, and recover access with one of ten single-use codes minted at registration.

The interface adapts to window and screen size, in light and dark themes, in Brazilian Portuguese and English.

What it does not do

Being clear about the boundaries is part of the design, not an omission.

• No media editing of any kind. No audio or video re-encoding, no transcoding, no image manipulation.
• No file management. Alexandria never moves, copies, or duplicates a file.
• No second account, no sharing, no profiles, no roles — inside Alexandria. There is one owner, and every catalog operation belongs to them. The local account the desktop application uses is that one account. In external mode Alexandria accepts anyone Heimdall places in its scope, but they all act as the same single owner: Alexandria keeps no per-person state, draws no distinction between them, and honours none of Heimdall’s own roles. Who may be the owner is decided there; what an owner may do is the same either way.
• No mail from Alexandria, in either authentication mode. With the local account the desktop application uses, the address is a login identifier and nothing else, and recovery goes through single-use codes rather than a message. In external mode the account belongs to Heimdall, which does send mail — email verification, password recovery, two-factor codes — but it sends it as the identity provider. Alexandria still sends none, and never sees a password. See Architecture.
• No server, no cloud, no synchronisation in the desktop application. It runs entirely on your machine.
• No mobile, web, or macOS build. Windows and Ubuntu only.

How it is specified

Alexandria is specified before it is built. Both code repositories carry a full set of requirements documents — a vision document, a system requirements document, a use case specification, and more. The Repositories page maps them all.

Next

• Architecture — how the pieces fit together.
• Installation — getting it onto your machine.
• Usage — getting it working once it is there.