Ariadne GUI is made with Qt framework and is a completely native application that looks and feels the same on Linux, Windows and macOS. This document will present you the most of its features.
When you launch ariadne-qt the main window appears.
This window has several parts. On the top there is a bar with the logo and some buttons. Most important part of that bar is syncing indicator — it will show whether Ariadne is synced with the blockchain network, with a percentage of downloaded blocks. If you want more detail, hover your mouse over the indicator and you'll see the status of local database and network one.
"Logs" button on the top bar will show you all the logs produced by the embedded blockchain node. ">_" button opens Knit command line and "Help" button shows reference for knit commands. Knit will be covered later in this text.
The rest of the window is divided in two parts: wallet tree to the left and wallet pane to the right. In the wallet tree you will see all your wallets and their accounts and wallet pane will give you information about the currently selected wallet and actions you can do with it.
On the first run the wallet tree will be empty. To create a new wallet press the "New wallet" button and a dialog will open. You can choose to create a completely new wallet or restore one from mnemonic by clicking on the dialog header and choosing the appropriate option.
In any case you will need to enter a name for the new wallet and choose a password, if you want to.
When everything is filled right, click the "CREATE" button.
If you are creating a completely new wallet, a new dialog will appear, giving you the mnemonic to your new wallet. As safety of this mnemonic is extremely important, the dialog takes extra steps to make sure that you wrote that mnemonic somewhere safe. To verify that, you will be asked to first write down the mnemonic, e.g. to a piece of paper, and then type it back into Ariadne. If the mnemonic matches, the wallet will be actually created. If, however, you fail to confirm your mnemonic, you have to start the process from the beginning.
Once the wallet is created you can select it in the wallet tree. On the right you will see its name and balance. Also there will appear a "Create account" button. Evey new wallet will automatically have one account and one address in that account.
When there are too many accounts in a wallet and you don't need to see all of them, you can fold it by clicking on the triangle left of the wallet's name.
In order to change password click on "Change password" button in the wallet pane and then password changing dialog will appear.
If you want to delete an account or a wallet, just click "Delete" button in the wallet pane. Since deleting a wallet is a rather dangerous operation, you will be asked to enter its name to confirm you understand what you are doing.
When an account is selected you can open its settings by clicking the "Account settings" button in the wallet pane. A dialog will open where you can change your account's name or delete it.
If you hover your mouse over wallet's name in the right pane, you will see a tooltip with wallet's
internal stable database id. You can use that id in several knit commands, such as send or new-account.
To copy that id to clipboard just right-click on the wallet name.
Wallet pane has two buttons for working with the blockchain — "SEND" and "REQUEST". Both will be visible only if the selected wallet has at least one account.
To receive a transaction in the blockchain from someone you need to give that someone one of your addresses. You can access the list of all your addresses by clicking the "REQUEST" button in the wallet pane. If you click it when a wallet is selected you will see addresses of all its accounts, otherwise you will see addresses of only the selected account.
Each address is annotated with its balance and a "Copy address" button. Click on this button will copy the address to system clipboard.
If you need a new address, click "GENERATE NEW ADDRESS" button. You will be asked for wallet password if it's password protected. After generation new address will be appended to the list.
As with requesting, you can click "SEND" when either wallet or account is selected. A send dialog will open, where you can choose basic or advanced version. Basic version provides single input fields for receiver address and send amount. Advanced version provides multiple amounts and receiver's addresses you want to send to. You can add new receiver only after filling addresses and amounts for current receivers. If you click "SEND" on a wallet, you will have to choose accounts to use as inputs as well. Click on "select accounts..." text right of "FROM" and a pop-up will appear, giving you the list of the current wallet's accounts along with their balances. Select desired accounts by clicking on their names and close the drop-down by clicking anywhere outside it. If you don't select any accounts, Cardano backend will select some based on default input selection strategy.
Remember that in Cardano you can not have a fraction of ADA less than 0.000001 (10⁻⁶).
If all of the amounts and receiver's addresses are correct, "NEXT" button will activate. After that, you will be asked to confirm your send transaction. If your wallet is password-protected, you will be asked to enter your password. After that the wallet will try to send your transaction and will display its hash in a message box if everything goes OK. If, however, some error arises, it will be displayed.
Ariadne has a built-in password manager that behaves like sudo command. When doing any operation
that requires wallet's password, like sending a transaction, a password prompt dialog will open.
If your wallet has password, check the checkbox in that dialog and enter your password, otherwise
leave the checkbox unchecked. Correctly entered password will be stored for 5 minutes after last
use. If 5 minutes pass and you did not do any new password-requiring operations, password will be
removed from memory.
Under the hood all operations that Ariadne does are represented as command in Knit language designed specifically for this task. For more experienced users we offer a way to use this language directly.
To do so, click ">_" button in the top bar and Knit repl will appear on the bottom of the window.
There you can enter commands and execute them by clicking Enter. Output of every command consists
of two rows: first one starts with ">" and contains the command you entered. The second one has
check mark, cross mark or hourglass signal with command id underneath it. Check and cross mean command
success and failure respectively, with command output right of them. Hourglass symbol indicates that
command is still executing. You can start several commands at the same time and they will be
executed asynchronously. To stop some long-running command you can use kill command with command's
id enclosed in <>.
For a in-detail reference of Knit language please refer to the relevant part of terminal UI user guide. All commands work exactly the same way in GUI version of Ariadne.