Introduction
Last updated 20 October 2026
MindLake is a notes app for Mac, with an iPhone companion, that keeps your notes, meetings, tasks, schedule and contacts together and saves what you write as plain Markdown files you own.
What MindLake is
MindLake is a native Mac app for the everyday parts of knowledge work: the notes you write, the meetings you record, the tasks that come out of them, your calendar and the people you work with. They share one window and link to each other. A meeting note holds its recording and transcript, the checkboxes in any note appear in Tasks, and each contact collects the notes that mention them.
- Files you own. Every note is a plain Markdown file in a folder called your vault. Open it in any editor, sync it however you like, and take it with you if you leave.
- Transcription on your Mac. Record a meeting and MindLake transcribes it on the Mac, tells the speakers apart and writes it into the note. The audio isn’t sent anywhere to be transcribed.
- An assistant that works on your notes. The AI assistant can search your vault, answer questions, and draft, summarise and edit notes, showing you what it changed. It’s off until you turn it on, and you choose what runs it: a model on your Mac, an AI app you already use, or your own provider account.
- No account to try it. The 14-day free trial needs no card and no sign-up. Buying MindLake and publishing notes to the web share one account, which you sign in to with a code sent to your email. A bought licence works on a Mac while you’re signed in there; signing out takes it off that Mac. See Trial and licence.
Your schedule comes from the calendars already on your Mac, and Contacts builds on Apple Contacts, so there’s nothing to import. Tasks are checkboxes inside your notes, so they live in the same files as everything else.
The sidebar
The sidebar is how you move around. New, the first row, makes a note; right-click it for a recording, a list or a canvas. Below it are the sections, in this order:
| Section | What it’s for |
|---|---|
| All Notes | Every note, list and canvas in the vault, as a gallery or a list. |
| Tasks | Every checkbox from every note in one place. Tick one here and it’s ticked in its note. |
| Schedule | Your calendar and your dated tasks on one timeline. |
| Contacts | The people in Apple Contacts, each with the notes that mention them. |
| Chats | Your conversations with the AI assistant. |
| Graph | Your notes and the links between them, plus a view of what takes up space. |
| Sources | Every image, PDF, audio file and attachment in the vault, in one gallery. |
| Snippets | Short triggers that expand into longer text as you type. |
| Organise | A year of your vault at a glance, and the work left undone: recordings never transcribed, empty recordings to clean up, transcripts never written up, notes whose type looks wrong, meeting people not linked to a contact, and notes with no links. |
Hold ⌃ to see each section’s number, then press ⌃1 to ⌃9 to jump to it. Under the sections, Folders and Tags switch between your vault’s folders and your tags. At the bottom are the vault’s name, which opens the vault switcher, and buttons for Help and Settings.
On a trackpad, swipe with two fingers to make room. Swipe left to tuck the sidebar away, and again to bring out the AI panel; swipe right to close the AI panel, and again to bring the sidebar back. A swipe over something that scrolls sideways, such as a wide table, scrolls it instead.
To go somewhere without the sidebar, press ⌘K and type. From any other app, ⌥⌘K opens the command bar, which finds notes and tasks and also does sums, conversions and quick captures. See Search and the command bar.
On your iPhone
The iPhone app, in testing now and coming to the App Store at launch, opens the same vault through iCloud Drive. Write and edit notes, record and transcribe, and check your tasks and schedule away from your desk. See MindLake on iPhone.
How these docs are organised
- Getting started: install MindLake, go through setup, learn how the trial and licence work, how your vault is laid out, and what the iPhone app does.
- Capture: record meetings, work with transcripts and speakers, dictate, take screenshots, collect sources, and use the menu bar and the notch.
- Organise: write notes, search and use the command bar, run your tasks, schedule and contacts, and use Organise, lists, canvases, the graph and snippets.
- AI: chat with the assistant, talk to it by voice, and let other AI tools use your vault through the MCP server.
- Reference: keyboard shortcuts, the file format, sync and backups, publishing, privacy, and a glossary.
For the ideas behind the app, read the MindLake Manifesto.