Khard is an address book for the Linux console. It creates, reads, modifies and removes carddav address book entries at your local machine. Khard is also compatible to the email clients mutt and alot and the SIP client twinkle. You can find more information about khard and the whole synchronization process here.

Warning: If you want to create or modify contacts with khard, beware that the vcard standard is very inconsistent and lacks interoperability. Different actors in that sector have defined their own extensions and even produce non-standard output. A good example is the type value, which is tied to phone numbers, email and post addresses. Khard tries to avoid such incompatibilities but if you sync your contacts with an Android or iOS device, expect problems. You are on the safe side, if you only use khard to read contacts. For further information about the vcard compatibility issues have a look into this blog post.

Khard is already packaged for quite some distributions. Chances are you can install it with your default package manager. Releases are also published on PyPi and can be installed with pip. Further instructions can be found in the documentation.

There is an example config file which you can copy to the default config file location: ~/.config/khard/khard.conf. khard has several subcommands which are all documented by their --help option. The docs also have a chapter on command line usage and configuration.

In order to build the documentation locally you need Sphinx. It can be build from the Makefile in the doc directory.

Khard is developed on GitHub where you are welcome to post bug reports and feature requests. Also see the notes for contributors.

Khard was started by Eric Scheibler and is currently maintained by @lucc. Several people have contributed over the years.

If you need a console based calendar too, try out khal.