Reference
Files
Everything tern reads and writes on disk, and what's safe to delete.
tern follows the XDG base directories. The paths below are the defaults. XDG_CONFIG_HOME, XDG_CACHE_HOME and XDG_DATA_HOME move them.
Config
| Path | |
|---|---|
~/.config/tern/config.toml |
your accounts, servers and settings. Written by --init, and edited in place by Settings |
~/.config/omarchy/current/theme/ |
read for colors (or theme_dir, TERN_THEME_DIR) |
Data (keep these)
~/.local/share/tern/ holds things that would be lost if deleted:
| Path | |
|---|---|
outbox/<id>.eml, outbox/<id>.json |
messages waiting to send, or retrying. Each is the message itself plus a small record |
draft.json |
the message you were writing, autosaved every couple of seconds. gr resumes it |
snoozed.json |
snoozed messages: account, Message-ID, subject, when, and where they go back to |
oauth/<account>.json |
OAuth access and refresh tokens, readable only by you |
Cache (safe to delete)
~/.cache/tern/ is rebuilt from your servers:
| Path | |
|---|---|
contacts.json |
every contact from your CardDAV address books |
calendars.json |
every calendar and its events, so the calendar opens instantly and works offline |
state.json |
which accounts are folded in the sidebar |
view/<uid>.html |
messages opened in the browser with o |
drafts/ |
temporary files while you edit a message in $EDITOR with :e |
Elsewhere
| Path | |
|---|---|
download_dir (default ~/Downloads) |
attachments saved with S |
Mail itself
Mail stays on your IMAP server. tern doesn’t keep a local copy of your mailbox, so there’s no Maildir to sync and nothing to rebuild.