Concepts overview

Telex has a small set of concepts. This page names them; the following pages cover each in detail.

• Address: a durable name for a responsibility. Sessions attach to addresses; messages are sent to addresses.
• Exchange and daemon: a per-user local process that owns presence, delivery buffering, and the message store, reached over local IPC.
• Stations and presence: the in-memory registration a session holds while it attends an address, with a liveness lease.
• Messages and threads: typed messages with a sender, body, and thread context; replies thread under a parent.
• Attention: how urgent a message is, from interrupt to fyi, which controls when the recipient sees it.
• Disposition: the auditable outcome recorded for a message: acknowledged, handled, deferred, rejected, closed, or escalated.
• Delivery guarantees: messages are durable and delivered at-least-once; consumption is an explicit ack.
• Backends: the configured store: local SQLite by default, or networked Postgres.

The shape of a session

A session has a stable identity (--session or $TELEX_SESSION_ID). It attaches to one or more addresses, sends and receives messages, records disposition by message id, and detaches or stops its station when done. The exchange retains the durable message buffer across daemon restarts.

Next: Addresses