RewindOS – Searchable screen history for Linux local

RewindOS, a private, open-source alternative to Windows Recall and Rewind.ai, launches for Linux with fully local screen capture, OCR, and AI search. The MIT-licensed tool runs entirely on-device with no cloud, account, or telemetry, offering sub-100ms full-text search and optional hybrid search via Ollama. It supports Wayland capture on KDE, GNOME, and wlroots compositors, and includes an MCP server for querying screen history from Claude Code.

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. | | 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 via xdg-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 https://modelcontextprotocol.io 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 /jaypopat/rewindos/blob/master/workers/update-proxy 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 https://rewindos-updates.incident-agent.workers.dev/stats . 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 https://ollama.com — 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 pause | 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 https://github.com/casey/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 threshold Excluded apps and window title patterns e.g. password managers, private browsing Retention period and storage limits OCR language and worker count Ollama 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