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.