Moldavite

A notes app that never takes your notes.

Website · User Guide · Agent Skills · Homebrew tap · Changelog

Jumping between notes with the quick switcher, following wiki links, and opening the graph view

Moldavite is a notes app for macOS. Your notes are plain Markdown files in a
folder you own. There is no account and no sync service.

Open that folder in Finder, put it in git, edit it in another app, and Moldavite
picks up the change. It also runs an MCP server, so Claude and other AI tools can
read your notes on your machine. Read tools are on by default. Writing stays off
until you switch it on.

Install

brew install --cask mauropereiira/moldavite/moldavite

Or download the latest release
and drag it to Applications:

Mac	File
Apple Silicon	`Moldavite_x.x.x_aarch64.dmg`
Intel	`Moldavite_x.x.x_x64.dmg`

Builds are signed and notarized, so macOS opens them without a warning. Requires
macOS 10.15 or later. Updates install themselves after a minisign check.

What it looks like

Moldavite editing a note, with the note list, folders, and calendar visible

Notes, folders and daily notes on the left, the editor in the middle, your
calendar on the right.

Searching notes, with matches highlighted in context

Search reads every note in the Forge and shows you the line that matched.

The graph view, with linked notes clustered and one node selected

The graph is built from your [[wiki links]]. Links that point nowhere yet stay
visible as hollow nodes instead of disappearing.

The AI and Agents settings panel, showing the MCP setup command and the write-tools switch

Settings has one panel for the whole agent story: the setup command for your
client, and the switch that decides whether agents can write.

Connect your AI

The app binary is also the MCP server. There is no separate daemon, and nothing
leaves your machine.

claude mcp add moldavite -- "/Applications/Moldavite.app/Contents/MacOS/moldavite" --mcp

If you installed with Homebrew, moldavite is already on your PATH:

claude mcp add moldavite -- moldavite --mcp

Settings → AI & Agents generates the right line for Claude Code, Claude Desktop,
Cursor, or any stdio MCP client. Add --forge "Work" to pin a client to one
Forge instead of following whichever Forge is open.

Tool	Does	Default
`list_notes`	Enumerate notes and locked-note placeholders, optionally by folder	On
`read_note`	Read one unlocked note by Forge-relative path	On
`search_notes`	Ranked full-text search with snippets	On
`get_backlinks`	Every note linking to a given note	On
`create_note`	Create a note	Off
`write_note`	Replace a note's contents	Off
`append_to_daily_note`	Append to today's note	Off

Turn the write tools off again and they vanish from the tool list mid-session.
Locked notes are excluded from all seven.

Some agents read files directly and never speak MCP. For those, one click writes an AGENTS.md
describing your Forge's conventions, plus a .gitignore for the directories the
app manages itself.

Moldavite Skills teach an
agent how to use all of this. They follow the Agent Skills spec, so they work in
Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode:

/plugin marketplace add mauropereiira/moldavite-skills
/plugin install moldavite@moldavite-skills

The Forge

A Forge is a vault. It is an ordinary directory holding ordinary files, and
you can keep as many as you like:

~/Documents/Moldavite/<ForgeName>/
├── daily/         # YYYY-MM-DD.md, created on demand, removed when emptied
├── weekly/        # YYYY-Www.md
├── notes/         # standalone notes, nested folders supported
├── templates/     # custom templates (JSON)
├── images/        # pasted and inserted images
├── .trash/        # 7-day retention
└── .plugins/      # installed plugins

Every write is atomic. A crash or a full disk cannot leave you with half a note.
If a file changed on disk while you had unsaved edits, the disk version is kept
as a timestamped conflict copy.

What else it does

Writing. Rich-text editing over Markdown-on-disk: headings, task lists,
code, resizable images, slash commands, pinnable tabs.
Linking. [[Wiki links]] and [[Display|target]]. Renaming a note
rewrites every inbound link across the vault and keeps your open tabs pointed
at the right file.
Finding. Backlinks panel, #tags with global rename, folders, and a quick
switcher on ⌘P. Search is a live scan, which is comfortable to roughly a
thousand notes.
Semantic search. Optional. Pick one of three embedding models, approve the
download, and everything after that runs offline. Apple Silicon only; Intel
Macs get keyword search.
Locking. Individual notes encrypt with AES-256-GCM and Argon2, with
rate-limited unlock and auto-relock. Locked notes stay out of search, indexing,
and every agent tool.
Calendar. Apple Calendar through EventKit and Google Calendar through a
read-only OAuth scope. Events are drawn and discarded. Moldavite never creates
or changes one.
Plugins. Each runs in its own Web Worker with no DOM, no network globals,
and no Tauri IPC. Consent is pinned to a hash of the plugin's code, so any
change asks you again. See docs/PLUGINS.md.
Moving in and out. One-time Obsidian vault import, ZIP and encrypted
exports, per-note Markdown and PDF export.

Privacy

No account system, no hosted notes service, no analytics, no telemetry.

Moldavite makes five network calls, all of them on purpose: a signed update check
about fifteen seconds after launch and once a day while open; the plugin registry
from GitHub when you press Browse; a semantic model from Hugging Face after you
opt in; Google Calendar while a Google account is connected; and plugin requests
to hosts you approved by name.

Publishing a note to WordPress is an action you take. Full detail in the
Privacy Policy.

Contributing

CONTRIBUTING.md has the setup, commands, and conventions.
docs/ARCHITECTURE.md explains how the pieces fit
together. docs/PROJECT_STATUS.md tracks what ships,
what is broken, and what is next.

_{Made by Mauro Pereira · MIT License}