Pensieve

Local search across your files, repositories and AI agent sessions, built to give your agents the best context for the job.

• Find anything: press Control+Shift anywhere on your Mac and search your documents, folders, code and past agent sessions by meaning or by exact words.
• Superpowers for your agents: agents connect over MCP and get the few most relevant files and passages instead of grepping your disk, which saves time and tokens. Each agent is scoped to what it's working on (by default, the repo it runs in).
• Know who to ask: git blame shows who owns what and who has the most domain knowledge, plus what each teammate has been working on.
• Find knowledge gaps: areas where most of the code was written by people no longer active in the repo, how many active people still know it, and who to ask now.

Everything runs on your Mac. Text is embedded with Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B and stored in SQLite (with a trigram full-text index for exact matches) plus turbovec vector indexes. AI-written summaries and insights are optional (built-in Qwen 3.5 9B, LM Studio, Claude Code or Codex).

Install

curl -fsSL https://tedhaley.ca/pensieve/install.sh | sh

On an Apple Silicon Mac, the script downloads the latest Pensieve.dmg and copies the app to Applications. Then it installs the pensieve backend with the installer inside the app. You do not need git, the Xcode tools or Python. The app starts when you run the script in a terminal. When an agent runs it, the script installs only.

Then connect your agents:

pensieve integrate recommended

This command finds the agents on your Mac (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Qwen Code, Windsurf, Claude Desktop and VS Code) and gives each one Pensieve as an MCP server.

Then set up Pensieve. Pensieve indexes nothing until you finish setup, also after a reset. When the app opens, it shows the steps:

1. Read what Pensieve does.
2. Choose how you use your Mac: software development, AI coding agents, documents and office work, or research and notes.
3. Let Pensieve look for sources in the folders that those choices need. macOS can ask you to allow access to some folders. Pensieve reads no folder before this step.
4. Choose what to index from what it found. Add folders or repos that it did not find.
5. Choose an engine for insights, or turn insights on later.
6. Start indexing.

An agent can do the same setup in its chat. Until setup is done, every MCP connection also gets the setup_guide, setup_scan, setup_add_source and setup_start tools. setup_guide tells the agent which questions to ask, in order. From a terminal:

pensieve setup                  # list the agent sessions, folders, repos and apps found, with their sizes
pensieve setup recommended      # index the ones marked [x]
pensieve setup agents/claude repos//Users/me/code/app   # or exactly these

The first index uses a lot of energy: the embedding model runs until it finishes, about 500 code files a minute on Apple Silicon. Settings → Sources shows what is syncing now.

On Linux and Intel Macs, the script installs uv and the backend from source. Then it starts the backend and opens the Map in your browser.

Or by hand:

uv tool install git+https://github.com/TedHaley/pensieve   # the backend: `pensieve`
git clone https://github.com/TedHaley/pensieve && pensieve/mac/build.sh --install   # the Mac app (needs the Xcode tools)

On first run Pensieve downloads the embedding model (~1.2 GB), then indexes in the background. Search and the map fill in as it goes.

The search panel

Press Control+Shift (tap both, release) to open it, or Control+Shift+Space. The tap needs Accessibility permission (System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility → Pensieve); the Space combo works without it.

To open Pensieve with ⌘Space instead of Spotlight, choose ⌘Space in the menu bar under Search Shortcut, or in Settings. Pensieve turns off the Spotlight shortcut while it runs. To give ⌘Space back to Spotlight, choose another shortcut. When Pensieve quits, Spotlight gets ⌘Space back too.

Pensieve starts at login by default. To stop this, turn off Launch at Login in the menu bar.

A plain search also puts a folder first when its path names every word (person build). Under an empty field, Options lists all of these.

The panel also finds apps, System Settings panes, the individual settings in each pane, and quick toggles (Dark Mode, Wi‑Fi, Mute, Lock Screen, Sleep). These results come from the Mac app only, so they never show on the map. A strong name match shows first as the Top Hit, and Tab completes its name. On a toggle, ⌘Return opens its pane in System Settings and does not change the setting. The panel ranks the apps and settings that you open frequently higher.

Under On This Mac, the panel also finds documents and folders anywhere on the Mac by name. These matches come from the Spotlight index, so Pensieve does not index them and they do not show on the map. The list leaves out code: source files and files in a git repo are found through the code index, which also searches their content. A file that Pensieve already indexes shows only in its usual group.

The panel calculates and converts units: 2^10, 15% of 240, 80 + 15%, sqrt(2), 3 ft in cm, 72 f to c, 2 cups in ml. Return copies the result.

Return opens · ⌘Return reveals in Finder · ⌥Return shows it on the map · ⌘C copies the path · ⌘O opens the Map · Esc closes.

Code results open at the matching line in your editor if you set editor to vscode, cursor or zed.

The Map window

Use it from your agents (MCP)

Agents are only as good as the context they're given, so each agent connection works within a scope: a slice of the index, such as the repo it's working in.

pensieve integrate recommended connects every agent on your Mac. For Claude Code, it runs the first command below. --scope user makes Pensieve available in every project. Without it, claude mcp add connects only the folder you run it in.

claude mcp add --scope user pensieve -- pensieve mcp   # stdio; scope "auto" = the repo the agent was started in
claude mcp add pensieve -- pensieve mcp --scope payments
claude mcp add --transport http pensieve "http://127.0.0.1:8765/mcp?scope=payments"

• auto (the default for pensieve mcp) uses the agent's working directory: the first named scope that includes that repo, otherwise just that repo with its worktrees and the agent sessions run in it. Outside any repo it means everything. In a repo that Pensieve does not index, search tells the agent to use grep. It does not return code from your other repos. HTTP connections can't see the agent's folder, so name a scope there (no ?scope = everything).
• Named scopes are lists of sources, e.g. payments = repos/~/code/billing + repos/~/code/ledger + files/~/Documents/specs. Create them in Settings → Scopes or with the save_scope tool. Everything stays in one index; a scope only filters, so nothing is embedded twice.
• Every tool respects the scope: search, read, similar, who_knows, list_repos, team, unexplored. An item outside it is refused.
• The search panel and the Map use default_scope (empty = everything).

For agents that only speak stdio, the JSON config is {"mcpServers": {"pensieve": {"command": "pensieve", "args": ["mcp"]}}}. pensieve mcp starts the backend if it isn't running.

Tools: search, read, similar, who_knows, knowledge_gaps, list_repos, team, unexplored, open, current_scope, index_path. Tool descriptions are sent to the agent on every turn, so these eleven are all an agent sees by default. index_path indexes a folder when you ask the agent to: a git repo, a folder of repos, a folder of agent sessions, or documents. Pensieve finds out which kind it is. Connect with ?tools=all (HTTP) or pensieve mcp --all-tools to add the ones that manage Pensieve itself: show_search, show_visualizer, status, list_scopes, save_scope, delete_scope, list_sources, set_source, add_folder, remove_folder, get_settings, update_settings, reindex. Until setup is done, every connection also gets the setup tools: setup_guide, `setu