Quick Start

This walkthrough takes you from an install command to a rendered lineage graph. You need a Mac — Apple silicon or Intel — and one command:

curl -fsSL https://install.meridian.online/brightfield | bash

Homebrew works too: brew install meridian-online/tap/brightfield. Both channels, and what each puts on disk, are on the Brightfield page.

Step 1: Open the Welcome door

Run it with no arguments:

brightfield

The window opens on the Welcome door — what Brightfield shows when nothing is open anywhere. Under the greeting sit a Start row with keyboard help, an Explore gallery of four starting points that ship inside the binary, and a Learn zone (a placeholder today). Every gallery card opens on a rendered result: no path to type, no empty canvas to fill first.

Step 2: Open the crosswalk

Click the first card: Open the EDGAR ↔ GLEIF crosswalk (no run).

What draws is a lineage graph — a real ten-source protocol, from the fetches at one end to the validated crosswalk table at the other. It's the same protocol behind the crosswalk you can query in your browser at /datasets/edgar_gleif; here you're reading how it's made, node by node.

The (no run) in the label is a disclosure, not decoration. You're looking at the protocol's declaration — its manifest, rendered as a graph — not at the results of a run on your machine. Nothing was fetched to draw it.

Step 3: Render a chart

The other three cards open composed charts: a signals dashboard (a year of generated daily readings beside their weekday profile), a reading distribution (five thousand samples binned into a histogram in-engine), and an activity breakdown (events aggregated and ranked by the engine). Open any of them and the charts view fills with a drawn result, rasterised on your GPU.

Step 4: Home keeps your place

Whenever you're off the door, the top bar shows a Home button. Click it and you're back at the Welcome door — and a Continue card now stands on it, offering the way back into what you had open. Quitting doesn't lose your place either: a later launch reopens your last start rather than greeting you again. The door returns only when the window is emptied.

Step 5: Open your own spec

Name a spec and Brightfield opens on it:

brightfield my-dashboard.yaml

Specs are portable YAML or JSON in the Mosaic grammar, over Parquet, CSV, JSON, inline data, or DuckDB database files. The install script keeps the bundled examples on disk, so there's something to try immediately:

brightfield ~/.brightfield/cli/latest/examples/bars.yaml

Every bundled example draws with the network switched off; a spec of yours only reaches out when it names a remote source.

BRIGHTFIELD_PROTOCOL_OFFLINE=1 brightfield ~/.brightfield/cli/latest/examples/protocol/edgar_gleif/arcform.yaml

That's the first five minutes

Install → Welcome door → a rendered crosswalk → Home → your own spec. From here the interesting question is what to point it at.