Brainstead 2.5.1

New note fits a short window: on a laptop with display scaling, its template list and form now scroll inside the dialog, so every template and the Create button can be reached, and the list fades at the foot while there are more below. The welcome no longer opens over a New note dialog. An SVG picture with no width set now shows in Edit, as it does in View.

Installing

Mac (Apple silicon, macOS 14 or later): open Brainstead.dmg and drag Brainstead onto Applications. The first time you open it, macOS says it can't check the app for malicious software, as it isn't notarised by Apple: click Done, then in System Settings › Privacy & Security click Open Anyway.

Windows (10 or 11, 64-bit): run Brainstead_x64-setup.exe, added a few minutes after the Mac's files. If Windows says it protected your PC, click More info, then Run anyway: the installer isn't code-signed. It installs for you alone, with no administrator password.

Brainstead 2.5.0

Brainstead now runs on Windows 10 and 11 (64-bit), with a per-user installer that needs no administrator rights and updates itself. Everything works there: tasks, notes, the wiki, Ask and the assistants, Read aloud, Export PDF, spelling and grammar (Windows' own spell checker, with grammar checked on the PC), the text in images, quick capture, the tray icon and the Outlook and Teams capture extensions. Windows has no menu bar: the keys still work, and Check for Updates… is in Settings › About. Thanks to Angus Pearce for the Windows port. On a Mac: clicking a grammar mark shows its fixes again.

Installing

Mac (Apple silicon, macOS 14 or later): open Brainstead.dmg and drag Brainstead onto Applications. The first time you open it, macOS says it can't check the app for malicious software, as it isn't notarised by Apple: click Done, then in System Settings › Privacy & Security click Open Anyway.

Windows (10 or 11, 64-bit): run Brainstead_x64-setup.exe, added a few minutes after the Mac's files. If Windows says it protected your PC, click More info, then Run anyway: the installer isn't code-signed. It installs for you alone, with no administrator password.

Brainstead 1.2.0

A calmer, cleaner look across the app.

• Lists and side panels lose their boxes; task details are one quiet grey line, with only overdue dates in red.
• Today sums up the day in a sentence, adds Coming up this week, and uses a second column on a wide window.
• The Inbox shows the AI's suggestion first (↩ accepts it) and groups the choices by whether the item needs doing.
• Changes folds each run, opens one at a time, loads older runs as you scroll, and says read-only once with a button to turn it off.
• The task pane offers everything the task menu does, and tasks are renamed on their row with a pencil.
• Quieter title bars: a note's less-used buttons moved to its ⋯ menu.
• The sidebar has a Tools menu, and ⌘1 to ⌘0 go to its first ten rows (a note's View, Edit and Source are now ⌥⌘1 to ⌥⌘3).
• A retuned dark mode, consistent pane widths, and layouts that hold up on narrow windows.

Brainstead 1.1.8

Assistants can add images to the vault (add_image) for the notes they write; each is listed in Changes with Revert. Export PDF now includes a note's images.

Brainstead 1.1.7

• Compare any two documents. It sits beside Doc check in a new Tools section of the sidebar, with Draft reply and Meeting notes. Both run in the background, keep their results, stop early when the documents aren't about the same thing, and Stop really stops.
• Act on several items at once. Tick items in the Inbox, Sources or Suggest and act on them together. You get one count of what worked.
• Every source's actions in one place. Make a meeting note from a transcript, draft a reply to a thread, ingest, or Ask about this source: from the Inbox, a Sources row or the file menu.
• Draft reply takes changes. Ask for a change, with Undo. Your draft now survives other edits in the vault.
• Knowledge health stays current and offers a fix for every issue: Did you mean, Restore from the Trash, Ignore all, and add orphan pages to index.md.
• Projects: rename a project on its page and a task from its menu, and drag areas and projects into order.
• Changes: search, and with a search on, a run's Accept, Reject and Revert all act only on what it shows.
• A transcript stays in the Inbox until its meeting note is made and ingested, and comes back if you revert the note.
• Many reliability fixes. Renaming a page by case only no longer loses its facts, Stop no longer keeps a half-finished check, and an Ignore made while the checks run is no longer lost. Templater help in a long template now offers the names declared in earlier tags.
• The Teams extension reads Microsoft's meeting recap on SharePoint.

Brainstead 1.1.6

• Brainstead updates itself. It checks once a day and from Brainstead › Check for Updates…, shows what's new in its own window, and installs when you say so, with a bar while it downloads. It waits while Ask, an ingest or a scheduled job is running, and asks about unsaved edits before it restarts.
• Claude sessions stay connected through updates. Brainstead's MCP server switches to the new version by itself, and new tools show up without reconnecting.
• Right-clicking an empty part of a window no longer offers Reload.
• The installer has a new look to match the website.
• The installer's labels are easier to read in dark mode.

Brainstead 1.1.0

Brainstead now has a website: https://brainstead.davies.co.za/

• Projects: areas fold, and Brainstead remembers which are folded. Rename an area from its band. Edit opens a project's note in Edit.
• The website, from the app: a Website button in Settings › About, a clickable link in Brainstead › About Brainstead, and Help › Brainstead Website. Assistants get the address from app_status.

For a Mac with Apple silicon (M1 or later) and macOS 14 or later. Download Brainstead.dmg below; the README has the install steps.

Brainstead 1.0.0

The first public release of Brainstead: a home for everything on your mind. Tasks, notes and a wiki that writes itself, over a folder of plain markdown that other markdown editors can open too.

For a Mac with Apple silicon (M1 or later) and macOS 14 or later.

What it does

• Today and GTD. Today shows what's overdue, due and back from deferral, and who you're waiting on. The Inbox, Tasks, Projects (with contexts, areas and effort) and a guided weekly review do the rest, and Find tasks and projects reads your recent notes for what you meant to do.
• Quick capture from any app. ⌃⌥Space catches a task or a thought wherever you are, even with Brainstead's window closed. A menu-bar icon shows today at a glance.
• Notes. Read in View, write in Edit (markdown shown as you'd read it) or Source. Wikilinks, tags, callouts, maths, Mermaid diagrams, Tasks queries, Dataview and Templater all work. The editor suggests notes, tags and template functions as you type and explains each one. Click an image to see it full size. Focus mode (⌘.) hides everything but the page, and notes can be read aloud.
• A wiki built from your sources. Ingest emails and Teams chats captured from the browser, PDFs, Office files and images, and the assistant writes wiki pages with every claim quoted from its source. Brainstead checks each quote. Every page has the same shape, with a dated Timeline, and Knowledge health, a daily check and a contradictions check keep it in order. The Graph shows how it all connects.
• Meeting notes in one step. A Teams transcript becomes a meeting note, is ingested and its transcript moved to the Trash in one go.
• Ask, with the assistant you already have. Chat about your vault with Claude Code, Codex, Copilot or Antigravity, signed in with your own account. Brainstead is its own MCP server, so an assistant can do almost anything the screens do, and it answers questions about the app from its own help.
• Every AI change can be undone. Assistants change your notes only through the app. Each change is listed in Changes with Revert, and changes to templates, code that runs or a system note's header wait for you to accept them.
• Safe with your files. An existing vault opens read-only until you turn that off. Saves are atomic, never overwrite a file changed elsewhere, and never reformat what you didn't touch.
• Fast. Search answers in milliseconds, from an index kept outside your vault.

Install

1. Download Brainstead.dmg below, open it and drag Brainstead onto Applications.
2. Open Brainstead. It isn't notarised by Apple, so macOS says it can't check it: click Done, then go to System Settings › Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway.
3. Choose your vault folder, or click Create a new vault to start with a few example notes. When you're happy for Brainstead to change files, turn off Read-only in Settings › Vault.

Every screen has help behind its ? button. Brainstead is free software under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later.