Ask your Mac a question in your own words. Get the answer, and the file it came from. Nothing leaves the Mac.
"how much was the lease deposit" → The security deposit on the Woodland Ave lease is $2,400, due at signing [1]. with the lease one click away.
Your Mac cannot do this on its own. Spotlight finds files but does not read them for you. Siri does not answer from your documents. A chatbot will, but only after you upload the documents to someone else's computer. Ask for Mac reads the files on your Mac, answers with citations, and uploads nothing.
Download Ask-for-Mac-1.0.0.dmg (macOS 14 or later, Apple Silicon and Intel; written answers need macOS 26 with Apple Intelligence)
Open the DMG, drag the app to Applications, open it. The first time, macOS says the app is from an unidentified developer: right-click the app, choose Open, then Open again. That is once. Nothing else to set up.
Press ⌥ Space in any app and the panel floats over your work, like Spotlight. Type, press Return, read, press Escape. The full window is there too, for settings and longer sessions.
- Find. Your Mac already keeps a full-text index of every file and mail message: Spotlight. Ask for Mac asks it for files containing your words, within the dates you named.
- Read. Those files are read on the Mac: PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, RTF, HTML, text, Markdown, CSV and Mail messages. When a question asks for a screenshot or photo, images are read with on-device text recognition; when it mentions notes, Apple Notes are read through the Notes app.
- Rank. Each file becomes passages, scored on the words they contain and on meaning, using the Mac's own word embeddings. No file may take more than three places.
- Answer. On macOS 26 with Apple Intelligence, Apple's on-device model writes two or three sentences from those passages with numbered citations, and says plainly when the files do not answer. Anywhere else, the answer is the best sentence quoted from the top file.
Every answer lists its sources. An answer you cannot check is not an answer. While it works, the sources appear the moment ranking finishes and the answer streams in over them as Apple's model writes it. The empty panel suggests questions about the documents you changed most recently, so the first question is never a blank page. ⌥ Space brings the window forward from anywhere. Follow-ups work: after "lease deposit", "and when is rent due" keeps looking at the lease. Right-click a folder in Finder and choose Services › Ask for Mac About This, or drop a folder on the window, to ask about just that folder; --in <folder> on the command line.
- It does not upload anything, anywhere, ever. No account, no server, no Private Cloud Compute.
- It does not build a second index of your files. Spotlight's is the only one.
- Numbers, Pages and Keynote are read through the preview image Apple stores inside each document, so the first page only. Apple keeps the rest in a format nothing else can read. Images are read only when a question asks for a screenshot or photo, because recognising text in every picture for every question would be slow.
- It does not answer from general knowledge. If it is not in your files, it says so, and lists the closest files so you can look yourself.
- Folders you do not want searched, a folder of source repositories inside Downloads say, can be skipped in Settings or with
askmac skip add <path>.
ln -s "/Applications/Ask for Mac.app/Contents/MacOS/AskMac" /usr/local/bin/askmac
askmac "lease deposit last week"
askmac "dentist invoice crown" --json
askmac "tax return 2025 total" --quote
askmac status
Exit 0 when answered, 1 when nothing was found.
./build-app.sh --install # universal build, ad-hoc signed, into /Applications
askmac selftest # tests without Xcode, against a temporary folder of files
swift test # the same tests through XCTest
tests/integration.sh # the command line end to end
MIT licensed. See PRIVACY.md and CONTRIBUTING.md.
Four more small apps built the same way: each does one thing, says exactly what it touches, and never phones home. Free, MIT licensed, no accounts. All five at keithadler.github.io.
- Permissions for Mac: every permission on your Mac on one screen, in plain English, with what changed since last week.
- Clip for Mac: a clipboard that remembers, with a stack you paste through one item at a time, and that refuses to record passwords.
- Tidy for Mac: cleanup and speed for the whole family; nothing is deleted, only moved to the Trash with an undoable receipt.
- Stash for Mac: encrypted backup into storage you already have; the provider only ever sees ciphertext.