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github-actions[bot] edited this page Aug 6, 2026 · 11 revisions

Kartend Wiki

The user guide for Kartend — a Qt6 / KDE frontend for organizing and launching multimedia collections (films, music, audiobooks, reference materials, anything you can hand to a launcher).

If you just want to get something on screen, jump straight to Getting Started. If you've already built a library and want to dig into a feature, the index below is grouped by purpose.

Index

Start here

  • Getting Started — first launch, your first collection, browsing and launching items
  • Collections — naming, hierarchies, parents and alias parents, type metadata, reparenting, duplication, deletion
  • Shell Collections — collections without media of their own, used to group other collections into top-level categories like Video → Films / TV Shows / Documentaries
  • Launcher Import — build collections from the games already installed through Steam, Flatpak, or Lutris, with their existing artwork and on-demand re-sync

Browsing & navigating

  • View Modes — Grid, List, Cover Flow, Horizontal — what each one does and the settings that affect it
  • Search, Sort & Filter — search bar, search modes, sort menu, type filter, regex title cleanup, hide-missing
  • Input & Controls — keyboard, mouse, gamepad; full shortcut reference; rebinding

Items & launching

  • Launchers — primary launcher, additional launchers, reusable presets, RetroArch / libretro, archive extraction, per-item override
  • Artwork — auto-discovery, custom artwork types, manual links, sidebar gallery, artwork cycling, placeholder tiles, subfolder generator
  • Video Previews — sidebar video, video-first Cover Flow, supported formats, volume
  • Item Metadata — custom user-defined fields, manual file links (PDFs, manuals), per-item launcher override, detail page

Organizing your library

  • Playlists & Favorites — built-in Favorites, custom playlists, M3U / JSON import-export
  • Smart Playlists — rule-driven playlists: recently launched, most played, by extension, by date added, has artwork
  • History & Statistics — launch history, per-item play counts, Statistics dialog, runtime detection

Look & feel

Special modes

  • Attract Mode — idle screensaver-style behavior: autoscroll, advance selection, suspension during launch
  • Marquee — secondary always-on-top window for arcade-cabinet toppers: item artwork, collection icon, or looping video, per screen
  • Backup & Migration — .kart package format, export, import, preflight validation, conflict policies, headless command-line workflow

Reference

  • Scraper — fetching metadata and artwork from TMDB, MusicBrainz, OpenLibrary, ScreenScraper; batch scrape, rescrape modes, DAT lookup, quotas, resume after crash
  • Scraper Credentials & Keychain — how Kartend stores scraper passwords/API keys in the OS keychain, what the @keychain sentinel in settings.ini means, how to install the dependency on each platform, plaintext fallback
  • Settings Dialog — anatomy of the dialog, scope selector, apply-to-selected, propagation rules, every tab
  • Toolbar & Menus — items-page toolbar, hamburger fallback, full menu reference, customization
  • Configuration Reference — every INI key, type, default, description (per-collection and [General])
  • CLI Reference — all command-line flags
  • File Locations — config, database, cache
  • Logging & Diagnostics — environment variables, kartend.* logging categories, useful invocations
  • Troubleshooting — fixes for common issues

Building, contributing, internals

The wiki is intentionally end-user-leaning. Each page has a short "For developers" section at the bottom where it makes sense. Standalone developer documentation lives one level up:

Conventions used in this wiki

  • Bold for UI labels (menus, buttons, dialog field names).
  • monospace for INI keys, paths, commands, and code identifiers.
  • Tables list defaults next to keys whenever a default exists.
  • "Where to find this" boxes point you at the Settings tab and the matching INI key for any feature, so you can use either.
  • Cross-references are inline links — no auto-generated TOC.

Project links

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