Minder is a native macOS sidecar for Apple Mail: Gmail-style search over a local SQLite FTS5 index of your V10 mail store, opened with ⌘K (configurable) while Mail is frontmost.
The UI is a non-activating NSPanel (SwiftUI) so Mail stays key. It’s centered on Mail’s front window using Accessibility frame reads and continuous repositioning when you move or resize Mail (falls back to screen center if the frame isn’t available).
Open in Mail: prefers AppleScript to select the message by Message-ID in the existing viewer, then message://, then opening the .emlx file.
Index: FSEvents-driven incremental reindex; Gmail-style operators (from:, in:, dates, etc.) and BM25-ish + recency ranking. HTML bodies get a styled preview; plain text when needed.
Hotkey: Carbon global shortcut, armed only when Mail is frontmost (NSWorkspace + AX notifications). Panel is brought forward again when you switch back to Mail.
Permissions: Full Disk Access (~/Library/Mail/V10/) and Accessibility. Onboarding links into System Settings.
See PLAN.md for stack and roadmap.