Private by design: no cloud, no account, no telemetry. Your notes are plain Markdown files that never leave your machine, and the AI runs there too.
curl -fsSL https://blackstardesigns.github.io/memo/install.sh | sh
Mid-debug idea, standup notes, a TODO from a code review: jot it in the next pane over. Everything runs on your machine: the editor, the AI, the speech model.
There is no server to trust, no account to create, no telemetry to opt out of. Refinement and dictation run on your hardware, and your notes are files in your home directory. Nothing ever leaves your machine, because there's nowhere for it to go.
Press n
, type, done. Vim-adjacent muscle memory, folders, search, and export; no mouse required, no Electron in sight.
Ctrl+R
cleans up grammar and adds Markdown structure using a model on your machine (MLX or Ollama). The original is always kept, side by side.
Hold F5
for push-to-talk, double-press for continuous listening. Speech-to-text runs locally via whisper.cpp: nothing leaves your device.
YAML frontmatter, atomic saves, fully portable. grep
them, pipe them, commit them to a repo: your notes are readable in any editor, forever.
It's just a TUI in a shell: drop it in a tmux pane, a zellij tab, an SSH session, or Warp. If your setup renders a terminal, memo already works there.
No daemon, no background sync, no runtime to install. A single fast binary for macOS, Linux, and Windows that starts before you finish the thought.
Type /
at the start of a line, or Ctrl+O
from anywhere in it, and search as you type. Drop in a to-do, callout, link, heading, or hidden comment, or fire an action like Change title and Refine note. Ctrl+L
ticks a to-do off without reaching for the palette at all.
One command installs memo and sets up a local AI backend for you. Read the script first if you like; it's open source, like everything else here.
On Apple Silicon the installer sets up MLX; on Intel Macs and Linux it uses Ollama. Prefer a manual install? Grab a prebuilt binary.
Requires Rust, CMake, and a C/C++ compiler: whisper-rs
compiles whisper.cpp at build time. See [the docs](docs.html#build-from-source).
New note. Start typing your rough thought.
Refine it with AI: grammar fixed, structure added.
Flip between your original and the refined version.
Back to the list, already autosaved. Back to your code.