One bite of the madeleine brings it all back.
Version: 0.15.3 · combray — the website
A personal macOS app that rescues near-illegible handwritten letters into a searchable, browsable archive. Photograph a letter with your iPhone, and Claude transcribes it — then stores it as a structured entry (sender, recipient, date, summary), side-by-side with the photo, organized by people and year, searchable in full text.
Download the latest Combray.pkg and open it. It installs Combray into your Applications folder (so it shows up in Spotlight, Launchpad, and the Applications window).
Combray isn't notarized yet, so the first time you open it, right-click Combray in Applications → Open (or run
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Combray.app). After that it opens normally.
brew tap Labern/combray
brew install --cask combrayFrom 0.12.0 on, Combray updates itself. It checks GitHub on launch and every 20 minutes; when a newer release is published, a small "Restart to update" bubble appears bottom-left. Click it to relaunch into the new version, or just quit and reopen — the update applies on its own. It only ever replaces the app bundle, so your letters are never touched.
git clone https://github.com/Labern/Combray
cd Combray
swift run CombrayCombray takes a photograph of a handwritten letter and turns it into a permanent, searchable, beautifully-set archive entry — the original image on one side, a faithful transcription on the other. Here is the full tour.
- Photograph with your iPhone. The Mac shows a QR code; open it on your phone and photograph each page. They appear in a strip as you shoot and upload straight into a new letter — your phone even shows Sent → Transcribing → Done. No companion app to install.
- Or drag & drop photos onto the window, or choose files from the Mac. Any way of getting the pictures across works.
- Sign in with Claude — one click, no API key. Combray uses your existing Claude plan: a browser page opens, you approve, and you're in.
- Faithful transcription of even near-illegible cursive, preserving stars, symbols, and the letter's layout.
- Structured details, extracted automatically — a "Letter to … from … about …" title, the sender and recipients, the date, a short summary, and notable quotes.
- Endearment → real name. If your mother signs every letter "sweetness," Combray infers who that really is and records the real name in the To/From field, keeping the original endearment too.
- Everything is editable. Fix any word and Combray refreshes the summary and details to match. Pinch the photo to zoom; drag the divider to give either side more room; right-click a page to replace it with a clearer photo or add another.
- Set like a real letter. Paragraphs are reflowed and justified in a warm serif — no jagged early line-breaks. (Screenshots and code keep their exact layout in monospace instead.)
- Read aloud. Press play to hear the letter, with the word being spoken highlighted as it goes, a position / total timer, and ±15-second skip. The voice matches the writer's likely sex; if your Mac only has the built-in robotic voices, one click installs a natural one (free).
- View full size opens the transcription big and centred for a comfortable read.
- Browse by People to see everyone someone corresponded with, or by Years to read your archive as a timeline.
- Full-text search across every letter — "Find a specific letter" by theme, period, writer, or a pair of people, with ranked, highlighted results.
- Read a correspondence as a chat (beta) — the back-and-forth between two people laid out like a modern messaging thread.
- Pin up to three important letters to the top of the sidebar.
- Export to Word (
.docx) in the same beautiful font you read on screen. - Share to Gmail — opens a draft with the letter, one click.
- Meta — what the letter quietly reveals. An optional panel surfaces Claude's read on the likely location, relationship, its state, the writer's goals, and their likely sex and age.
- Light & Dark mode, switchable from the toolbar; the whole look is built on design tokens so it re-themes in one place.
- Automatic updates (see above) and one-click iCloud backup of every letter folder.
Every letter is written to a plain, Finder-browsable folder at ~/Documents/Combray/letters/<n>/:
letter_<n>_page_<y>.jpg— the original page images (open them in Preview)letter.json— sender, date, summary, and the transcriptiontranscription.txt— the transcription as plain text
The app rebuilds its index from those files on launch, so your archive survives even a future rewrite of the app. Nothing is locked inside a proprietary database.
Built with Swift / SwiftUI + GRDB, transcription by Claude. Named for Proust's village of recovered memory — and yes, the icon is a madeleine.