Anonymous handles

A handle is a short, human-friendly name like user1234 that lets people collaborating on a shared watchlist tell each other apart — without signing in. It becomes the author on the notes you post.

Why handles exist

teemtape watchlists are shared by a token and used by multiple people at once. Without any identity, every note would be equally anonymous and you couldn’t follow who said what. Handles solve exactly that, and nothing more:

• They give notes an attributable author on a shared watchlist.
• They require no email, password, or personal data.
• They are a display identity, not a credential — anyone can claim any free handle.

How they work

• A handle is auto-generated and unique (a user1234-style name) the first time you go to add a note.
• You can change it to anything that’s still available.
• It’s stored client-side so it persists with no sign-in:
  • the web app keeps it in localStorage,
  • the CLI keeps it in ~/.config/teemtape/config.json.
• Uniqueness is enforced server-side: claiming a handle reserves it globally so two people can’t use the same one.

Rules

Handles are validated and normalized by the API:

• 3–20 characters,
• letters, numbers, -, and _ only,
• must start with a letter, and
• normalized to lowercase.

Managing your handle in the CLI

teemtape handle                # show your current handle
teemtape handle trader_jane    # claim a specific handle (must be available)
teemtape handle --generate     # get a fresh, unique handle

You can also set a handle for a single command with the --handle flag or the TEEMTAPE_HANDLE environment variable. See the configuration reference.

Fallback authors

If a note is posted without a handle, teemtape falls back to:

• agent-cli for notes with source: "cli", and
• a short anon-xxxxxx label derived from the watchlist token for web notes.