Mind Palace

Mind Palace is a free macOS menu bar app that indexes your Apple Notes, Safari Reading List, and local folders into a single, instantly searchable knowledge base — all on your own machine, with nothing sent to the cloud.

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View on GitHub

Your Memory Palace, Searchable

The name comes from the method of loci — the technique Sherlock Holmes used to organize everything he knew into a mental palace he could walk through at will. Mind Palace does the same for your digital life: Notes you’ve written, articles you’ve saved, files you’ve collected. One search box. Everything surfaces. You can read the full origin story here: Mind Palace: A Personal Search Engine for the Way I Actually Work.

 Features

  • Full-text search across Apple Notes, Safari Reading List, and local folders
  • Content previews with keyword highlighting
  • Tag filtering via Apple Notes smart folders
  • Click any note to read it inline or open it in Notes.app
  • Click any file to open it in its native app
  • Syntax-highlighted viewer for 30+ code and text file types
  • PDF, DOCX, and PPTX text extraction
  • Auto re-scan on a configurable interval (1–24 hours)
  • macOS notifications when scans complete 
  • Installable as a PWA — add to your Mac’s dock or iPhone home screen
  • Launch at login support
  • No external dependencies, no cloud account, no telemetry
Menu Bar
Navigating ‘Rooms’
Configuration Settings
Search results

Requirements

  •  macOS 13 Ventura or later (Apple Silicon and Intel)
  • Full Disk Access granted in System Settings
  •  Safari (for Reading List indexing) 

Installation

  1. Download MindPalace.zip from the link below and unzip it
  2. Move MindPalace.app to your Applications folder
  3. Open it — the app is signed and notarized, so macOS will launch it without a security warning
  4. Grant Full Disk Access: System Settings → Privacy & Security → Full Disk Access → click the + button → add MindPalace
  5. The menu bar icon appears and the first scan runs automatically
  6. Open http://localhost:8221 in any browser to start searching

Full Disk Access is required to read Apple Notes and your Safari Reading List. Mind Palace accesses these files read-only and never transmits anything off your device. The source code is fully available on GitHub if you’d like to verify that for yourself.

A Note on Privacy

Mind Palace was built for people who think carefully about what their tools do. Everything runs locally. The app opens a server on localhost:8221 —  accessible only from your machine unless you explicitly expose it on your network. No analytics. No crash reporting. No update checks. The only outbound connection is the notarization ticket Apple staples to the binary at build time, and that’s read-only metadata your Mac verifies silently when you first launch.

Building from Source

Mind Palace is written in Swift with no external dependencies and builds entirely from the command line — no Xcode project required.

git clone https://github.com/dwmetz/MindPalace.git
cd MindPalace
bash build-app.sh

  – Download Latest Release → https://github.com/dwmetz/MindPalace/releases/latest/download/MindPalace.zip

  – View on GitHub → https://github.com/dwmetz/MindPalace