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that’s some time yet I began to use emacs as much as possible for quite everything (org-mode, Gnus, etc.), but I’m still maintaining a single file with a list of names, numbers, adresses, etc. manually… And I know there’s BBDB inside emacs, which seems to be linked to a lot of things… How to learn to use it? What is it supposed to do exactly? How? Why? etc.

For now I just found the v2 manual (outdated it seems) and this post: Where is the canonical location for the BBDB manual?

galex-713
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  • Welcome to Emacs.SE! The question you posted is too broad for this site; let me suggest that you have a look at the [site tour](http://emacs.stackexchange.com/tour) to get a better feeling for what kinds of posts make sense here. You can then start with the [EmacsWiki node on `bbdb`](https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CategoryBbdb) and then ask more specific questions here as they come up. – Dan Mar 11 '16 at 13:33

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It's basically very simple:

Just type M-x bbdb RET RET. You'll end up in an empty contacts list, a BBDB buffer. Then start inserting contacts :-). Have a look at the menu. That should get you started.

Once you have some contacts you can search for them, print or export them, use completion with them when sending mail, refer to them in org-mode buffers or even dial them using an external sip client.

As with everything in Emacs the sky is the limit.

egli
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    ok thanks but when I do `M-x bbdb` it just asks me for “Search records matching regexp”… :/ what’s your version and where did you get it from? I’m on Debian and I got mine trough packages.el – galex-713 Mar 11 '16 at 11:02
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    I also tried the Debian package `bbdb` and `bbdb3` but it just does the same… – galex-713 Mar 11 '16 at 11:15
  • @galex-713 that's fine. If you just hit `RET` as egli wrote, it'll just open the buffer, however, if you already had some contacts in the database, you could also write a regular expression to match them to be displayed in the buffer. Since I typically need the later I do `M-x bbdb` `.*` `RET` (this would show all the contacts). – wvxvw Mar 11 '16 at 18:49
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    I had to actually add a first contact with some function beginning with `bbdb-` to make `M-x bbdb RET` work but now it’s done I did it and it works, thank you all ^^ – galex-713 Mar 20 '16 at 04:02