RawDrop

Drop anything into your knowledge vault. Compile it into a wiki with one button.

A macOS menu bar app that feeds and compiles a personal, Karpathy-style LLM knowledge base living in Obsidian.

Download · signed & notarized · universal (Apple Silicon + Intel)

 

Light and dark — the capture list sits under Compile; pending sources at full opacity, compiled ones dimmed.

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Why

Andrej Karpathy described a simple loop: pour raw sources in, let an LLM compile them into a wiki, and let the wiki compound over time. The hard part is the capture-and-compile surface — somewhere frictionless to drop things, and one button that turns them into notes.

RawDrop is that surface. It lives in your menu bar, copies whatever you drop into your Obsidian vault's raw/ folder, and — on demand — compiles the new material into linked concept articles under wiki/. Everything stays local unless you point it at Ollama Cloud. No account, no telemetry, no lock-in — the output is plain Markdown in a folder you already own.

How it works

Two jobs, nothing more.

1 — Capture (drop / paste). Files, HTML, images, and URLs are copied into Knowledge/raw/ — never moved, never overwritten (collisions become 2, 3, …). While the popover is open, ⌘V captures the clipboard. The list under Compile shows pending sources first, then already-compiled items (dimmed).

2 — Compile. One button. For every raw file not yet processed (tracked by content hash): chunk → summarize via Ollama /api/chat → write concept articles under Knowledge/wiki/ with origin frontmatter → update wiki/_index.md. Process state lives in ~/Library/Application Support/RawDrop/ — not in your vault.

Features

• Menu bar popover — drop zone, ⌘V capture, one Compile button, capture list, Settings / Quit. No Dock icon.
• Local or cloud Ollama — default http://localhost:11434, or Ollama Cloud with an API key stored in the macOS Keychain.
• Smart model picker — recommended models ranked from what you have installed, plus a connectivity test.
• Broad capture — HTML extraction, PDF text (PDFKit), image paste as PNG, URL fetch → Markdown.
• Provenance + safe recompile — every article carries lean origin frontmatter; hybrid recompile preserves your ## Human and <!-- rawdrop:protected --> edits.
• Native comforts — System / Light / Dark theme, Open at Login, and no App Sandbox surprises (writes only where you tell it).

Full inventory in FEATURES.md.

Install

Download RawDrop 0.3.8 (.dmg), open it, and drag RawDrop to Applications. Launch it — it appears in the menu bar (no Dock icon).

The app is a universal binary (Apple Silicon + Intel), signed and notarized by Apple, so it opens with no Gatekeeper warning.

Usage

1. Click the menu bar icon, open Settings…, and set Knowledge root to a folder that has (or will have) raw/, wiki/, and outputs/.
2. Drop or paste (⌘V) a file, link, or image onto the popover — it lands in raw/.
3. Press Compile. New sources become linked articles in wiki/.

Make sure Ollama is running (or Cloud is configured) before the first Compile.

Requirements

• macOS 14+ (Sonoma or newer)
• Ollama — local install or an Ollama Cloud API key — required only for the Compile step
• An Obsidian vault (or any folder) to hold raw/ and wiki/

Building from source

git clone https://github.com/aka-kika/rawdrop.git
cd rawdrop
xcodegen generate
xcodebuild -scheme RawDrop -configuration Debug -derivedDataPath ./DerivedData build
open ./DerivedData/Build/Products/Debug/RawDrop.app

Or open RawDrop.xcodeproj in Xcode and Run. Needs Xcode 15+ and XcodeGen. Full walkthrough: docs/environment.md.

Vault law

The rules RawDrop plays by, so it never surprises your notes:

• Writes only under Knowledge/raw/ (on drop), Knowledge/wiki/, and optionally Knowledge/outputs/.
• Never edits or deletes anything in raw/ after it lands.
• Wiki articles use lean YAML (type, date, status, tags, origin, sources as raw/… paths, compiled), plain text, and [[wikilinks]]. URLs live in a ## Sources footer; the recompile-safety hash stays internal (Application Support), not in your frontmatter.
• Hand-edit under ## Human or <!-- rawdrop:protected --> and recompile will leave it alone.
• No cloud LLM unless you explicitly configure Ollama Cloud + API key.

Defaults

Setting	Default
Knowledge root	~/Documents/Knowledge (change in Settings)
Ollama base URL	http://localhost:11434
Model	ministral-3:latest (change in Settings)
Theme	System
Open at Login	Off (Settings → General)
Cloud	https://ollama.com + Keychain API key

Documentation

Doc	Purpose
FEATURES.md	Feature inventory
ARCHITECTURE.md	Layout and data flow
CHANGELOG.md	What shipped
DECISIONS.md	Why we chose X over Y
docs/environment.md	Dev setup
docs/privacy.md	Privacy & permissions
docs/roadmap.md	Now / Next / Later
docs/support.md	FAQ & troubleshooting
SECURITY.md	Secrets and network rules
CONTRIBUTING.md	How to contribute

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome — start with CONTRIBUTING.md, and see SECURITY.md for reporting anything sensitive.

License

MIT — free to use, modify, and share.

_{Built by aka-kika.}