Guides

Chat

A window that can search and read your whole memory — for the questions that are not about writing anything.

Press ⌥Space anywhere and a small panel opens: Ask your memory. It answers from the wiki Minne keeps of what you have been working on, and from the raw captures underneath it.

This is the half of Minne that is not about drafting. What was agreed. When that landed. Who asked for it. What you did on Tuesday.

#Opening it

⌥Space from any app, or Open Chat in the menu bar. The shortcut toggles: it summons the panel to wherever you are, and closes it when it is already in front of you. Escape closes it too.

It follows you across Spaces and floats over fullscreen apps, and it remembers where you put it and how big you made it.

If another app already owns ⌥Space, Minne cannot register it and says so in Settings rather than leaving you pressing a dead key. Open chat from the menu bar instead, or turn the shortcut off in Settings → General.

#What it can do

The assistant has five tools over your memory, and it is told to search before it answers rather than guessing:

You can watch it work: a small line above the answer says Searching memory for "oslo trip"…, Reading wiki/ingrid-berg.md, Updating wiki/oslo-trip.md, and switches to the past tense when it is done.

#Yes, it can write to your memory

This is the difference between chat and the Minne key. The drafting key gets search, read and list only — a draft may consult your memory but must never rewrite it. Chat gets all five.

The instruction it works under: when the conversation establishes something durable about a person, a project or a topic, record it — passing chatter is not memory. So it will not write a page because you said hello, and it will not usually volunteer one for small talk.

The practical consequences:

• Correcting Minne is a conversation. "Ingrid moved to the platform team, not infra" — ask it to update the page and it will, and log that it did.
• You can dictate memory. "Remember that the Oslo trip is now the week of the 14th" gets written down.
• If it does not write something you wanted written, ask directly. The threshold for volunteering is deliberately high.

Everything it writes is subject to the same rules as the sync pass: only wiki/ is writable, index.md is updated for it, and a page carrying a link that resolves to nothing is refused outright. See Your memory folder.

#The conversation itself

The transcript lives in the running app and is not saved to disk. Quit Minne or let the brain restart and the conversation is gone; what it wrote into your wiki is not.

New chat (the pencil icon) clears it deliberately. A turn that failed is rolled out of the transcript on both sides, so a retry starts clean rather than inheriting the wreckage.

One answer streams at a time. The stop button keeps whatever arrived before you pressed it.

#Where the answers come from

The same memory everything else uses, and nothing else. If your wiki does not know something, chat does not know it — it is instructed to say so plainly rather than fill the gap.

Two things follow from that:

• A brand-new install knows nothing, because nothing has been distilled yet. Captures accumulate immediately; they become wiki pages when the sync pass runs, every 30 minutes.
• What it can find is what has been written down. The raw captures are searchable for as long as they are kept — 90 days by default — and the wiki outlives them.

#When something goes wrong

Errors render inline with a Retry button that drops the failed exchange and resends. The ones you will actually see:

#Reading your memory from somewhere else

If you would rather ask these questions inside Claude Desktop or another MCP client, Minne can serve the same memory read-only over local stdio. See Minne in Claude Desktop.