Andon User Guide
About this guide
This guide explains how to use Andon. It covers every feature, including project branching.
Andon is a desktop app that shows the state of all your projects at a glance with four signal colors, and keeps the story behind each one: notes, files, earlier versions and abandoned approaches. Everything stays on your own computer.
New to Andon? Follow the quick start at the end of chapter 2, Getting started: you will have a first project running in five minutes. For shortcuts and answers to common questions, go to chapter 16, Quick reference.
Chapters
| Chapter | What it covers |
|---|---|
| 1. Welcome | The andon idea, Andon's principles, and a tour of the main window |
| 2. Getting started | Installing, first launch, where your data lives, updates, uninstalling, and a quick start |
| 3. Three colors, four states | What white, green, orange and red mean, and what to write when you use them |
| 4. Work as a river | Why Andon has no "done", why green is more resilient, and why small changes keep the flow going |
| 5. Projects | Creating, editing, viewing, sorting and archiving projects, and finding your way with history and the breadcrumb |
| 6. Tasks and child tasks | The Tasks tab, child tasks, how colors are calculated, why a task is orange or red, sorting, filtering and folders |
| 7. Notes | The note editor: formatting, code, task links, find and replace, saving |
| 8. Note history | Earlier versions of notes: comparing, restoring and how long they are kept |
| 9. Files, Compare and Markdown sync | Attachments, comparing tasks side by side, and mirroring a folder of Markdown files |
| 10. Todo lists and Kanban boards | Which to use, checklists, and boards whose cards follow a definition of done |
| 11. Search and archive | What search covers, searching inside a project, and the archive |
| 12. Branching projects | Turning tasks into a project of their own, shared with the original project |
| 13. Good habits: a worked example | One project from start to finish, a weekly routine and note templates |
| 14. Plugins: paths and changes | The Plugin Manager, draw.io to define the path, Yi Jing to assess change |
| 15. Preferences and your data | Every setting, backups, recovery and moving to a new computer |
| 16. Quick reference | All shortcuts, where every button is, and frequently asked questions |
| 17. Glossary | The words this guide uses |
The four states in one line each
| Color | State | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| White | Initialized | Clean slate: not started yet |
| Green | NTR (RAS in French) | No problem, the flow is going. Not "done" |
| Orange | Blocked | A temporary blocker: waiting for a resolution |
| Red | Called off | This route is going nowhere: set aside, to be taken up again in another context |
Red is memory, not failure: an abandoned route stays in the project, so when the idea comes back months later in a different context, you can see what was tried and why it stopped.
Conventions
Labels you see in Andon, such as Attach File, are shown in bold. The guide uses Andon's English labels; in French the same buttons carry their French names.