Command line and MCP

Use accent /path/to/vault to open a vault, or add a note path to open it too. accent --terminal /path/to/folder opens a terminal there. For a remote vault, use an address such as accent ssh://user@host/path/to/vault. Run accent --help for the other launch forms.

accent-cli can query a vault without opening a window. For example, accent-cli search --vault /home/me/Notes "meeting notes" prints matching lines. Use accent-cli backlinks --vault /home/me/Notes Project.md to find notes linking to Project.md. The tags and stats commands show a vault’s tags and index summary. CLI search accepts the same qualifiers as the Search pane. Quote the query so the shell passes tags and date comparisons unchanged.

accent-cli search --vault /home/me/Notes '#research kind:pdf,note modified:7d'

PDF matches name their page, for example paper.pdf#page=12. PDF text is read in the background while the app or an MCP server keeps the vault open. A one-shot CLI query uses text already indexed.

Connect an agent

Set your agent’s MCP server command to accent-cli with these arguments:

mcp --vault /home/me/Notes --read-only

This starts a local stdio server, and it works while the Accent window is closed. Read-only mode lets the agent search and inspect files without editing them. Omit --read-only if you want to allow its note-writing tools. For a remote vault, run the MCP server on the host beside the files.

To start an agent connected to the open vault, add it under Preferences → Commands and run it from the vault’s window. For Claude Code:

claude --mcp-config '{"mcpServers":{"accent":{"command":"accent-cli","args":["mcp","--vault","."]}}}'

For Codex:

codex -c 'mcp_servers.accent.command="accent-cli"' -c "mcp_servers.accent.args=[\"mcp\",\"--vault\",\"$PWD\"]"

The MCP tools include search, backlinks, tags, code exploration, and diagram rendering. Diagram rendering also needs the Accent app and a graphical display where the server runs.

Explore and read files

Ask explore about names, paths, words, [[links]] or #tags to get ranked source excerpts with line numbers, outlines, links and call paths. Its default code relationships match names within the same language. It quotes call sites and lists implementations or subtypes where the scanner finds them. Set precise to request a language server’s call hierarchy and a trait’s implementations when available.

Comparing the same method with CodeGraph on seven questions about this repository yields following benchmark results:

You can run the benchmark yourself via build-aux/explore-bench.py.

read_note reads Markdown and Org sections, and returns a text file’s etag for subsequent writes. For a PDF, it returns indexed text under page headings without a write etag. A Jupyter notebook returns cell sources by default, while view: "raw" returns its editable JSON and etag. write_note needs the returned etag to replace an existing file.

Jobs and shared terminals

Add --allow-jobs to enable detached command jobs and terminal tools on the machine running the server. Jobs continue after the client disconnects. They start an argument list directly, so shell syntax needs an explicit shell such as sh -lc. The tools can start, list, read and stop jobs, and send literal input to terminals. In read-only mode, only listing and reading are available.

To make a desktop terminal available, right-click it and choose Share with MCP. Use Revoke MCP Access from the same menu to remove that access. Sharing controls Accent’s terminal tools, while clients allowed to run arbitrary commands retain the host user’s normal access. An unattached terminal’s result includes a host-local attach command for taking it up interactively. Finished jobs remain for seven days, with a rolling 16 MiB output tail read by byte offset.