A private, open-source alternative to Windows Recall and Rewind.ai. Everything you've ever seen on your screen, instantly searchable — no cloud, no account, no telemetry, 100% on your machine.
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Ask — chat your history with cited screenshots
Truly local. Capture, OCR, search, and AI all run on your machine. No cloud, no account, no telemetry — it works fully offline.Open source. MIT-licensed. Read every line, audit what it stores, fork it.Built for Linux. Native Wayland capture viaxdg-desktop-portal
- PipeWire — works on KDE, GNOME, and wlroots compositors. No competitor ships here.Fast. SQLite FTS5 gives sub-100ms full-text search across weeks of screen history.
| RewindOS | Windows Recall | Rewind.ai | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Linux / Wayland | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Open source | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Local-only, no cloud | ✅ | ✅ 1 | |
| ✅ | |||
| No subscription | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ |
| Bring-your-own AI (local or API) | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Independent — not shut down / acqui-hired | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ 2 |
1 on-device, but closed-source and Windows-only. 2 Rewind → Limitless → acquired by Meta; the Mac app's capture was disabled Dec 19, 2025, and EU/UK data deleted.
Rewind got the privacy model right — it stored everything locally too — but it was macOS-only, proprietary, and is now gone. RewindOS is the open-source, Linux-native version that no acquisition can switch off.
Also open source:
[omi]— but macOS-only and cloud-backed. RewindOS stays fully local and Linux-native.
🔎 Search & Recall Full-text search across everything on your screen in under 100ms. Optional hybrid search fuses keyword + semantic results (Ollama embeddings, Reciprocal Rank Fusion). Perceptual hashing skips near-identical frames, and scene grouping keeps results clean.
🎞️ Browse & Replay Scroll your screen history chronologically with hourly grouping, or scrub through it as a timelapse with speed controls and keyboard navigation. A dashboard surfaces app-usage stats, daily/hourly activity charts, and a heatmap calendar.
🤖 Ask AI Ask questions about your screen history and get answers with inline citations, a Sources card, and click-through to the exact screenshots. Backed by Claude Code (opus / sonnet / haiku) or local Ollama via a per-chat model picker. Pin screenshots as context; copy, regenerate, and follow-up.
🔌 Works with Claude Code & any MCP client The daemon ships an MCP server, so you can query your screen history straight from Claude Code (or any MCP-capable agent) — "what was that doc I had open yesterday?" — without leaving your terminal. Exposes tools for search, timeline, recent activity, app usage, per-screenshot detail, and meeting transcripts; all local, same database the app uses.
🗂️ Organize A rich-text journal (Tiptap) with tags, templates, screenshot attachments, and AI summaries. Bookmarks & collections to save what matters. Vault export writes daily memory notes (journal, recap, meetings, key moments, stats) straight into your Obsidian or Logseq vault.
🔒 Privacy
Exclude specific apps or window-title patterns (password managers, private browsing). Global hotkey Ctrl+Shift+Space
opens search instantly; the app runs quietly in the system tray.
RewindOS reaches the network on its own for one thing: a daily check-in (the app's update check and the capture daemon's heartbeat) via a small Cloudflare Worker (open source, in this repo). The worker hashes your IP with a daily, server-only salt to count distinct active devices, then discards it — no IP, no identifier, no payload is ever stored. All it keeps is an anonymous daily count, bucketed by app version and desktop environment (so the project can see release adoption and KDE-vs-GNOME mix); both are aggregate counts, never tied to you. The full dataset is published live. Opt out entirely with usage_heartbeat = false
under [privacy]
in ~/.rewindos/config.toml
. (The update check also falls back to GitHub directly if the worker is down.)
yay -S rewindos-bin # or: paru -S rewindos-bin
systemctl --user enable --now rewindos-daemon.service
RewindOS is local-first and privacy-focused, so the recommended install is download, read, then run:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jaypopat/rewindos/master/scripts/install.sh -o install.sh
less install.sh # read what it does
bash install.sh
Prefer a one-liner? (Same script, run directly.)
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jaypopat/rewindos/master/scripts/install.sh | bash
The installer detects your distro, installs the system dependencies (Tesseract, PipeWire, the webview, and the right desktop portal), downloads and checksum-verifies the latest release, and enables the capture daemon as a systemd user service.
Options
bash install.sh --with-paddleocr # higher-accuracy OCR (heavier Python deps)
bash install.sh --update # update to the latest release
bash install.sh --uninstall # remove RewindOS (asks before deleting your data)
Requirements: x86_64, a modern Wayland desktop (KDE, GNOME, Hyprland, Sway), and a current distro. The prebuilt binary targets recent glibc + webkit2gtk-4.1
; on older distros, build from source.
These are off by default; RewindOS works fully without them.
Ollama— local semantic search, chat, and journal summaries (everything stays on-device).- Claude Code CLI — higher-quality chat; once installed and registered with MCP, the Ask view's model picker exposes its tiers (opus / sonnet / haiku).
A background daemon captures screenshots every 5 seconds, deduplicates them with perceptual hashing, runs OCR via Tesseract, and indexes the extracted text into SQLite FTS5. A Tauri desktop app provides search, browsing, journaling, and analytics.
Timer (5s) → Screen Capture → Hash & Dedupe → OCR → SQLite FTS5
Linux on Wayland. Capture uses xdg-desktop-portal
- PipeWire, so it works on any compositor that implements the ScreenCast portal.
| Desktop | Status |
|---|---|
| KDE Plasma 6+ | ✅ Tested |
| GNOME 46+ | ✅ Tested — install the "Window Calls Extended" extension for app/window names |
| Hyprland · Sway · other wlroots |
x86_64 only for prebuilt binaries. X11-only sessions aren't supported.
After installation, the daemon starts automatically. The UI autostarts minimized to the system tray.
Open search:Ctrl+Shift+Space
View logs:journalctl --user -u rewindos-daemon -f
Restart daemon:systemctl --user restart rewindos-daemon
Launch UI manually:rewindos
Daemon CLI:rewindos-daemon | resume | status | backfill
At default settings (~5s interval, 8h/day):
| Metric | Estimate |
|---|---|
| Frames/day (after dedup) | ~2,880 |
| Storage/day | ~210 MB |
| 90-day retention | ~19 GB |
Screenshots are stored as WebP in ~/.rewindos/
. Retention is configurable.
Build from source
The install.sh
path above installs system dependencies for you — this section is only if you'd rather build it yourself.
sudo apt install \
libpipewire-0.3-dev \
tesseract-ocr tesseract-ocr-eng \
libclang-dev libsqlite3-dev \
libdbus-1-dev pkg-config build-essential
Tasks are run with just (
cargo install just
):
just install
This builds the Rust workspace and frontend, installs the daemon as a systemd user service, and sets up the desktop app to autostart minimized to tray on login.
Manual / dev build
cargo build --workspace # Rust crates
bun install # Frontend deps
bun run tauri dev # Run in dev mode
Configuration
Config lives at ~/.rewindos/config.toml
. Key options:
Capture interval and change sensitivity thresholdExcluded apps and window title patterns (e.g. password managers, private browsing)Retention period and storage limitsOCR language and worker countOllama endpoint for AI features (semantic search, chat, summaries)App categories— custom app→category rules for the activity breakdown (Settings → General)
Project layout
crates/rewindos-core/ Shared lib (DB, OCR, hashing, config, embedding, chat)
crates/rewindos-daemon/ Capture daemon (PipeWire, pipeline, D-Bus, window info)
src-tauri/ Tauri app (commands, D-Bus client, AI chat)
src/ React frontend
components/ Reusable UI components (search, charts, shared)
features/ Feature views (ask, dashboard, history, journal, rewind, saved, settings)
hooks/ Custom React hooks
context/ React context providers
lib/ API wrappers, utilities, query keys
docs/ Architecture & design docs
systemd/ Service files and desktop entries
MIT