File Palaces iconFilePalaces

Getting Started

This guide walks you through the first five minutes with File Palaces — from launching the app to getting your first AI-powered answer from your documents.

Prerequisites

You must have the sidecar running before the app can do anything. If you haven't installed File Palaces yet, start with the Installation guide.

1. Launch the app

Start the sidecar and the Tauri app:

# Terminal 1
cd sidecar && uv run python main.py 52731

# Terminal 2
cd filepalace && npm run tauri dev

When the app opens, you will see a loading screen: "Connecting to sidecar…". This disappears as soon as the sidecar responds on port 52731 (usually within 2–3 seconds).

2. First launch — empty state

On a fresh install the sidebar is empty with a prompt to add your first folder. You'll also see a settings hint if no LLM is configured yet.

LLM REQUIRED

File Palaces needs an LLM to answer questions. Indexing and search work without one, but the chat feature requires a configured provider. The easiest option is Ollama — see the Settings guide.

3. Add your first Wing

A Wing is a folder you've given to File Palaces to index. Each Wing gets its own namespace in the palace.

There are two ways to add a Wing:

  • Drag and drop — drag a folder from Explorer/Finder onto the app window
  • Button — click the + button in the sidebar, then pick a folder in the system dialog

After you add a folder, File Palaces immediately starts mining it in the background.

4. Watch the mining progress

A Mining toast appears in the bottom-right corner showing live progress. Mining extracts text from every supported file in the folder, chunks it, embeds it with a local sentence-transformer model, and stores it in ChromaDB.

Mining time depends on folder size and file types:

SizeApproximate time
~50 documents30–90 seconds
~500 documents3–8 minutes
~5,000 documents30–60 minutes (first run)

Subsequent runs only re-process files that changed — the watchdog observer tracks modifications automatically.

5. Ask your first question

Once the mining toast shows "Done", switch to the Chat panel.

Type a question about your documents and press Enter or click Send. The LLM will:

  1. Run hybrid search (BM25 + vector) across your palace
  2. Retrieve the most relevant chunks
  3. Stream a synthesised answer to the chat panel
  4. Show source badges below the answer listing the exact files cited

Click any source badge to open the Source Preview Modal, which shows the surrounding text chunk in context.

6. Filter by Wing

If you have multiple Wings and want to restrict the search to one folder:

  • Use the Wing selector in the chat toolbar
  • Typing @wingname in the chat input also scopes the query

7. Explore the palace

Besides chat, File Palaces has two more panels:

  • Search (Ctrl+/ / Cmd+/) — direct semantic + keyword search, no LLM needed
  • Palace Map — visual overview of all Wings, Rooms, file types, and drawer counts

Next steps