Glossary

Tasks a summary finds in a transcript, written into the note as checkboxes under an Action items heading.

- [ ] Send the deck to the board @kyle 📅 2026-10-02

Each one runs through the task language, so the owner becomes a person and “by Friday” becomes a due date, counted from the day of the meeting rather than the day you summarise. They show up in Tasks straight away.

An item can carry how much it matters (⏫ or 🔽), a line under it saying why, and its steps as sub-tasks. Something only suggested or left open becomes a Backlog task (⏬).

The one note your captures go into, picked at the notch. While it is set, every screenshot is attached to it, and text you grab off the screen is added to its end as well as copied.

I made my research note active and grabbed quotes into it from three web pages.

The notch’s list offers the note open in MindLake, then the ones you edited last; you can also search for any note or start a new one. Note ▸ Capture Into This Note sets the note you have open. Stop capturing from the same list or menu.

Nothing else changes: dictation still types where your cursor is. A locked note can’t be the active note.

A year of your vault at the top of Organise: one square per day, a column per week, shaded from less to more.

In All notes, a note counts on the day it was created and again on the day it was last edited; in Jobs, on its own date. Click a square to jump the timeline to that day.

The level below Low priority, for a task that is real but not for now. In the note it is ⏬ at the end of the task’s line.

- [ ] Rewrite the onboarding emails ⏬

Typing someday or backlog in the Tasks bar makes a task Backlog with no date, unless the line gives a priority too. Grouped by due date, undated Backlog tasks have a Backlog group of their own after No date; give one a date and it goes by the date.

Sorted by priority, Backlog tasks come last, after those with no priority. A summary writes what was only suggested or left open as Backlog tasks.

Sums typed into the command bar, answered as you type, with brackets, powers (^), sqrt, pi and percentages such as “20% of 150” or “150 + 10%”. ↩ copies the bare number.

90 kilos to pounds

It converts units of length, mass, temperature, volume, speed, area, data and time, written “X unit in unit”. An amount on its own converts to its usual counterpart; weight to volume assumes water, and says so.

Currencies take three-letter codes or £ $ € ¥, as in “£20 in eur”. Rates are the European Central Bank’s reference rates, fetched at most every 12 hours; nothing about you is sent.

A diagram of boxes, frames and arrows on an endless dotted grid, built for system diagrams and specs.

I pasted a Mermaid flowchart and it drew itself as boxes.

Each canvas is a .canvas file in your vault, in the open JSON Canvas format that other tools read too. Write ![[Name.canvas]] in a note to show a picture of it.

A small card over an area screenshot, with buttons to mark it up, copy it, copy its text, attach it to a note or pin it.

Leave it alone and it slips away after a few seconds; hovering keeps it. The file is saved either way. Window, full-screen and timed captures open straight in markup instead.

Your conversations with the AI assistant, which stays off until you turn on AI features in Settings ▸ AI and connect a model.

Summarise this meeting and put the decisions in the note.

The chat lives in the AI drawer on the right (⌘/). Its scope menu sets what the assistant sees: Whole vault, or this folder, note, canvas or list.

Each conversation is saved as a Markdown file in your vault’s Chats folder, so it syncs but never shows up as a note.

The last 200 pieces of text you copied, kept on this Mac outside your vault, so you can paste them again from the command bar.

/clip

Text only; anything over 100,000 characters is skipped, and so are passwords and other items apps mark as concealed, and anything copied from 1Password. ↩ pastes an entry where you were; ⌘↩ saves it as a note.

On by default. Turning off Keep clipboard history clears it, and Clear Clipboard History empties it at any time.

A floating search bar you open from any app with ⌥⌘K. MindLake stays in the background, and Esc or a click away gives the keyboard back.

/task call Sam friday

It finds notes, transcripts, tasks, contacts, chats, sources, folders, tags, lists, canvases, snippets, screenshots by their text, and commands. A result either opens in MindLake or acts where you are, with a short confirmation.

Under any search it offers to add the text as a task, save it as a note, or ask the AI if a connection is set up. It also does sums, conversions, quick links and slash commands.

The search overlay inside the library window, opened with ⌘K, for going straight to a note, section or command.

It is for getting somewhere; each section’s own ⌘F filter is separate. Type / to run a command by name.

A line joining two boxes on a canvas, drawn by dragging from a box’s connection point to another box.

Connectors can be elbow, rounded elbow, curve or straight, and elbows route around boxes in the way. Right-click one to add a label, change its line, weight and arrowheads, or animate its direction.

A light CRM on top of Apple Contacts that shows each person with the notes and meetings they appear in.

Priya’s History shows every meeting note she’s in, newest first.

Contact details you edit are saved back to Apple Contacts. The relationship layer (your notes about a person, tags, follow-up dates and logged interactions) stays on this Mac and does not sync.

A setting that copies your whole vault into a dated folder once a day, keeping the last 7 snapshots unless you choose another number, up to 60.

Sync copies my mistakes to every device, so I back up to an external drive too.

It runs when MindLake opens or you switch back to it; Back up now makes a snapshot straight away. Each snapshot is plain files, separate from iCloud: to restore, copy back what you need.

Speaking into any app on your Mac: double-press the dictation key, speak, and the words are transcribed on your Mac and typed at your cursor.

I double-press Fn, say the reply, and it lands in whatever app I’m in.

It is off until you turn on Dictate anywhere. The key is Fn (🌐) unless you choose Right Option, Right Command or Right Control. Hold it to dictate for as long as you hold; after a double-press, one more press ends the take and Esc cancels it. A take can run for 90 seconds.

The filler sounds um, uh, erm and hmm are always removed, and corrections you have made in transcripts are applied to dictation too.

Hiding the filler sounds um, uh, erm and hmm in transcripts, on screen and when you copy. It is on by default.

Nothing is deleted: turn it off and every filler comes back. Words such as like, you know, uh-huh and mm-hmm are never touched. Dictation always takes the same fillers out.

It is a Mac setting; on the iPhone, transcripts show every word.

A way to gather material for a note: describe your topic, tick the web results you want, and Save keeps their text and main pictures as sources.

What are you trying to understand?

Notes you already have come first, under In your vault. Wikipedia, OpenAlex, Hacker News and Stack Overflow work with no setup; general web search needs a key in Settings ▸ AI ▸ Finding sources.

A small note that stays on top of every app and every Space, for jotting while you work.

/float

It edits the vault note called Floating Note and saves a moment after you stop typing.

The block of key: value lines between two --- lines at the top of every note, holding its id, title, dates, folder, tags, people and more.

Write lists inline, as in tags: [team, launch]; MindLake ignores block-style YAML lists. Each save writes the frontmatter afresh, so keys another app added aren’t kept.

Markdown files without a frontmatter block aren’t notes yet. MindLake counts them beside their folder; right-click the folder to convert them.

A map of your notes as dots, coloured by type and sized by how many links they have, joined wherever one note links to another.

Clicking a person highlights every note they’re in.

Tags appear as rings among their notes, folders as shared bubbles, and people on a ring around the outside. The filter button picks which of these layers to show.

The Organise view that shows only the notes with something left to do, each offering one next step.

Six jobs run now: Transcribe (a recording never transcribed), Empty recordings (a recording MindLake listened to and heard no one in, on a note with nothing else in it, offered for deletion, which always asks first), Write up (a transcript nothing was made of), Change type (a note whose type doesn’t match its content), Link people (meeting people not linked to their contact) and Orphan notes (notes with no links in or out).

Collect scribbles and Suggest tags are on the job wheel too, marked Soon. Writing up uses the summary model set in Settings ▸ AI, which runs on this Mac unless you choose a cloud one.

Voices MindLake has learnt from speakers you named, so later recordings name those people for you.

I named Sam in one meeting, and the next recording knew him.

The voices in your last 60 notes are kept on this Mac, so naming a speaker still teaches MindLake after a restart, and Re-run Speakers keeps the names you gave. Each voice can be renamed or forgotten; voices stay on this Mac and never sync.

Your list of names and jargon: new transcripts are checked against it and near misses corrected, with known terms shown in a blue wash.

Add terms in Settings, with Add to Lexicon on selected text, or by applying a word fix; summaries add names and jargon too. A copy is kept as lexicon.txt in your vault.

What lets you keep using MindLake after the trial: £19 (€19, $19), once, on your account rather than a key.

It covers up to 3 Macs at a time, with up to 3 moves between Macs in any 30 days. A licensed Mac works for 30 days without the internet. Signing out takes it off that Mac.

Whatever the licence says, your notes stay plain files you can open in Finder.

MindLake’s name for a table: rows and typed columns, saved as a CSV file any spreadsheet can open.

I dropped a CSV onto the notes list and it became a list.

Column types include Text, Number, Rating, Select, Date, Checkbox and Person. On disk a list is a folder holding data.csv, schema.json for the columns, and notes.md for its Notes section.

An AI model that runs inside MindLake on your Mac, so chat and summaries work without sending anything out.

The choices are Gemma 4 E2B (3.6 GB), E4B (5.2 GB), 12B (6.8 GB) and 26B (15.4 GB); MindLake recommends one for your Mac’s memory. Chat uses it with the same vault tools as a cloud AI.

Apple Intelligence is the other on-Mac option: it can title, tag and summarise, but can’t run the assistant.

A note encrypted on disk. It opens with Touch ID or your vault passphrase; without the passphrase or the recovery key, it cannot be opened.

One unlock opens every locked note; Seal Locked Notes (⌥⌘L) or locking your screen locks them again. The AI assistant never reads them, and a recording attached to one is not encrypted yet.

A read-only server built into MindLake that lets other AI apps, such as Claude Code, search your vault, read notes, list tasks and follow backlinks.

It is the MindLake app started with --mcp-serve and the full path to your vault, so MindLake need not be open. Locked notes can’t be read, and paths outside the vault are refused.

Adding --index with the path of MindLake’s search index also gives clients find_notes, the ranked search MindLake’s own assistant uses.

It runs only on a Mac with a MindLake licence or a running trial. Tools that write notes are not part of the app’s server.

The panel under MindLake’s M in the menu bar, with buttons for a new note, a voice recording, a screen recording and a screenshot.

Its tabs search your notes, tasks, contacts and sources, and its search box has the cursor as soon as the panel opens. A voice recording made here goes into the Voice folder without making a note.

To hide the M, turn off Show MindLake in the menu bar in Settings ▸ General ▸ Notch & menu bar. MindLake stays in the Dock either way.

The choice in Tasks that shows your own tasks, one of three with Waiting on others and Everything. The person button at the top switches between them, and Tasks starts on Mine.

A task is yours if it carries your name, as set in Settings ▸ Brain, or no @name at all. Waiting on others shows every task whose @names are all other people. With no name set, all three show every task.

MindLake’s controls at the top of the screen, folded into the camera notch, or a thin handle under the middle of the top edge on a screen without one. Point at it to open it.

I point at the notch, press Grab text, and the words land in my active note.

Open, it shows the date, your next meeting with Record and Join, six buttons (Dictate, Prompter, New note, Capture, Grab text and MindLake) and the active note. It widens either side of the camera during a dictation or a recording, and as a meeting is about to start.

It is the default home for the dictation controls. Settings ▸ General ▸ Notch & menu bar turns the notch, the menu bar icon and the pill at the bottom of the screen on or off, in any combination; the notch and the icon start on, the pill off.

A plain Markdown file in your vault, rendered as you type, whose first heading is its title and whose file is named after it.

I renamed the note and its file was renamed too.

A note has frontmatter at the top, then the body, then a ## Transcript section at the end. Renaming a note updates links to it across the vault.

The section that shows a year of your vault at a glance and finds work you never finished, such as a recording never transcribed.

It found a recording I never transcribed and offered to do it.

It only suggests: nothing in your vault changes until you press one of its buttons. It leaves out locked notes, anything being transcribed and anything recorded in the last 15 minutes.

Dismiss a suggestion with ✕ and Organise stays quiet about that job on that note. Dismissals stay on this Mac; the eye button shows them, with Restore.

A small pill at the bottom of the screen for dictation: hover it for buttons to dictate, make a new note or open MindLake. It is off unless you turn on Show the pill at the bottom of the screen; the notch is the default home for the dictation controls.

During a take it shows a cross to cancel, the waveform and a tick to insert; a spinner means the words are being transcribed. With Keep them on screen between takes turned off, it appears only while you dictate.

Separately, with Show upcoming meetings on in Settings ▸ Audio, a record pill appears as a meeting starts; one click records it into a note named after the meeting.

A screenshot that floats above every app, exactly where you took it, and follows you across Spaces.

I pinned the error message beside my editor while I fixed it.

Drag it to move it, scroll over it to resize it, and double-click it or press Esc to close it. Right-click for Copy, Opacity, Close and Close All Pins.

Putting a copy of one note on the web at its own address, from your Mac, until you unpublish it.

Who can see it is Anyone with the link, Public or Password; the sheet starts on Public. Later edits stay on your Mac until you click Update.

It is the only part of MindLake with an account, signed in with a code sent to your email and no password. The transcript, recording, people and sources are not sent.

A keyword in the command bar followed by words, which opens a search on the web.

wiki Johnny Decimal

Built in: g (Google), ddg, yt, maps (Apple Maps), wiki, gh and def (dictionary). Add your own with /quicklink, a keyword and an address with {q} where the words go.

Audio of a meeting or call captured on your Mac, saved in your vault beside its note, and transcribed on your Mac when you stop.

I press ⌃⌘1 as the call starts and type notes while it listens.

With Capture system audio on, as it is by default, MindLake records the call’s audio as well as your microphone, on separate channels, which is how the transcript tells you apart from everyone else.

Keep audio, in Settings ▸ Audio, keeps recordings for good by default, or wipes them after transcription, 7 days or 30 days. The transcript stays either way.

The section that shows meetings from every calendar on your Mac as one agenda, where you can join a call or record it into a note.

The agenda opens on today and lists every day with something on, plus every weekend day. When a meeting is under way or starts within 15 minutes, a red record button appears on its row.

Linking a note to a meeting adds its attendees to the note, which helps tell the speakers apart. Schedule lists calendar events, not tasks, unless you turn on Show dated tasks in Calendar.

A short shortcut and the text it stands for, which expands the instant you type the shortcut’s last character.

I type :addr and my full address appears.

New shortcuts start with a colon, as in :addr, and $|$ marks where the cursor lands. ⌘Z straight afterwards puts back exactly what you typed.

Snippets live in snippets.json in your vault. With Accessibility allowed, they can expand in every app too, but never in password fields. The command bar can paste one (/snippet) or make one (/newsnippet).

A file attached to a note, such as a picture, PDF, video or recording, which the note’s AI can read once its text is pulled out.

Each carries a stage: Original (nothing extracted, so the AI can’t read it), Text extracted (the AI can read it) or Used in a note (its content has been folded into a note).

The Sources section shows every image, PDF, video and audio file in the vault in one gallery. Once its text is extracted, Clear Out Original (Keep Text) lets the file go and keeps the text.

A voice MindLake found in a recording, labelled Speaker 1, Speaker 2 and so on until you name it.

Who is this speaker?

On a call recorded with system audio, your microphone is you, labelled “Me” or your name. In a room, voices are told apart by sound alone; setting how many people spoke is the most reliable fix.

Click a label to name the speaker from the note’s attendees, your contacts or any name. Naming renames all their turns and adds the person to the note.

A sunburst view of your vault, measured from the files on disk: each ring outwards is one folder level deeper, and each wedge’s angle is its size.

Click a folder’s wedge to zoom in and the centre to zoom out. The Reclaim space panel can optimise audio, video and images, asking first and deleting an original only after its new copy is written.

A write-up of a transcript that Summarise, the sparkle button on the transcript bar, puts into the note: summary, topics, decisions, action items and open questions.

Out of the box it comes from Apple Intelligence on your Mac, which needs macOS 26. Once a local Gemma model is downloaded and chosen, that writes it instead, and a cloud AI can be chosen in Settings ▸ AI. It rewrites only its own sections (Summary, Topics discussed, Decisions, Action items and Open questions) and keeps the rest: ticked action items and tasks you added stay, and your own text and headings follow its sections.

A note still named “Recording ·” gets a real title, and the same AI may add names to your lexicon, name speakers it can identify, and tag or file the note.

A folder in a git repository paired with a folder in your vault, so an edit on either side is written to the other.

Files are matched to notes by their text and stay matched through renames. MindLake only reads and writes the files; committing and pushing are up to you. Locked notes are never written to git.

If both sides change, Docs diverged from git asks whether to Keep both, Use git’s or Use my note’s. Keep both uses Claude Code, so both versions are sent to Claude.

A label on a note, set by typing # and a word, which MindLake moves out of the text into a chip above the note.

#work/clients

Nest tags with a slash. In a task line, a #tag stays in the text, and a task also carries its note’s tags.

Any line in any note that starts with - [ ]. Tasks gathers them from the whole vault and writes each change back to its note.

- [ ] Pay the invoice #finance 📅 2026-10-12 ⏫

Ticking a task in Tasks ticks it in its note and adds the date it was done. Group by due date, priority, folder, tag, person or note, or lay them out as a board.

The plain words the Tasks bar understands, such as tomorrow, p1, @sarah, #finance and ~Clients, turned into a date, priority, person, tag and target note.

Pay the invoice 12 Oct p1 #finance ~Clients

A single word like friday counts as a date only after by, due, on, before or until, or at the end of the line. ^monday always means the date; someday means no date, on purpose, and makes the task Backlog (⏬) unless the line gives a priority.

The result is stored as plain text any tool can read: 📅 for the due date, ⏳ for a scheduled date, ⏫ 🔼 🔽 for high, medium and low priority, and ⏬ for Backlog.

A note’s words scrolling up beneath the notch at a speed you set, for reading aloud. Press Prompter in the notch and type to find the note.

I read my talk from under the notch, right beside the camera.

Headings show as cues in square brackets, and a meeting note’s transcript is left out. Click it to play or pause; then Space does the same, scrolling or ↑ ↓ move it by hand, − and + change the speed, R starts again and Esc closes it.

Settings ▸ General ▸ Teleprompter sets its typeface, text size, line spacing, alignment, width, height and scroll speed. It is kept out of screen sharing, recordings and screenshots, your own included, unless you turn that off there.

The days below the Organise heatmap, newest first, with each note shown as the same card you see in All Notes.

When a note has a job, a bar along the foot of its card names the job and offers its one action. Right-click a card for every action on that note.

The text of a recording, made on your Mac by a speech model, split into turns by speaker and kept in the note.

Click any word to play the recording from there. Words the model was unsure of are tinted yellow or pink; correct one and the fix is remembered for future transcripts.

In the file, everything after the first ## Transcript heading is the transcript, one paragraph per turn. Word timings sit beside the note in a .words.json file.

The first 14 days of MindLake, free, with no card and no account.

mindlake.app counts the days from the first time it sees your Mac, once per Mac, so reinstalling doesn’t start another. Starting it needs the internet, and a Mac on the trial checks in at least every 3 days.

What kind of note it is: Meeting, Idea, Plan, Reference, Media or a label of your own, set by typing a token such as -plan.

A Meeting is a conversation with other people, an Idea your own short, loose thinking, a Plan mostly tasks or steps, Reference material kept to look things up, and Media built around a picture, video, PDF or audio file.

The ordinary folder your notes are kept in, each note a plain Markdown file you can open, sync and back up however you like.

Everything I record lands in my vault as plain Markdown.

A note’s folder in the sidebar is its real folder on disk. Unfiled notes go in Inbox, and nothing stays loose at the top level. A hidden .mindlake file marks the folder as a vault.

Click the vault’s name at the bottom of the sidebar for the vault switcher, which creates new vaults, opens a folder as a vault or imports notes. Each vault is separate.

Talking to the AI assistant and hearing its replies read aloud, in a voice generated entirely on your Mac.

The speaker button in the chat drawer turns reading aloud on; the microphone button beside Send starts a hands-free conversation. Your speech is transcribed on your Mac and only the text is sent.

The voice is a one-time download of about 190 MB, with nine voices to choose from; the default is Alana in the Sleepy style. It reads chat replies, not your notes.

A link to another note in double square brackets, as in [[Project plan]]; type [[ to pick a note title.

Click a link to open the note, or to create it if no note has that title yet. Renaming a note updates links to it across the vault, and the Graph draws a line for each.