Minne

Introduction

Minne is a memory for your Mac — it remembers what you work on and writes from it wherever you type.

Minne is a menu-bar app for macOS. It reads the text of the window you are working in through the Accessibility APIs — the words, never a picture of your screen — and distils what it sees into a wiki of plain markdown notes in ~/Minne. Then it writes from that memory: tap one key in any text field and the reply, the summary or the answer arrives already knowing the context you would otherwise have gone digging for.

Two things make it different from most of its neighbours. There is no Minne account and no Minne server — the memory is a folder on your disk that you can open in Obsidian, edit by hand, or delete. And the intelligence is whichever AI you already pay for: sign in with Claude or ChatGPT, bring an API key, or point it at a model running on your own machine.

Minne is Swedish and Norwegian for memory.

#Start here

• InstallDownload, open past the quarantine warning, grant the one permission Minne needs.
• First runWhat onboarding asks you, and what Minne does in its first hour.
• Choose your AIClaude, ChatGPT, an API key, or a local model. The trade-offs of each.
• The Minne keyThe whole product in one keypress. Start here once it is running.

#What it does

The Minne key. Tap right-Option in any text field. Minne reads the field, the window around it and the notes it recalls, then writes a draft in a panel by the caret. Nothing is typed into your document until you press Insert.

Plain-words control. Type what you want instead of what you mean — "say yes but push it to Thursday" — and Minne replaces the instruction with the thing itself. Steer a draft you can see in the same plain words, and the corrections you keep making quietly become rules.

Chat. A window that can search and read your whole memory, for the questions that are not about writing anything: what was agreed, when did that land, who asked for it.

The memory. Not a black box. ~/Minne/wiki/ is one markdown page per person, project and topic, ~/Minne/sources/ is the raw captures they were built from, and SCHEMA.md is the file you own that tells the agent what to keep.

#Where the rest is

• Your memory folderThe on-disk format, page by page and field by field.
• What leaves your MacEvery byte that goes anywhere, per feature, and what never does.
• SettingsEvery control in the app, its default, and what changing it does.
• TroubleshootingSymptom, cause, fix — including the apps where insertion is awkward.