Inkvault

InkVault

Local-first, user-owned persistent memory for your AI conversations, browsing, and work.

Keep the context behind your work: what you asked, what you learned, and the pages you opened. InkVault preserves supported AI sessions and the browser history you choose in a local SQLite vault, so you can find them again after the original tools have cleared their history.

Search your vault yourself in the Memory Atlas, or connect an AI tool through MCP so it can retrieve past context when you ask. Optional Windows screen capture adds a timeline of the apps you use and text from apps you choose. You control the sources, the vault folder, and the backups.

InkVault is free and MIT licensed. No account or telemetry. InkVault itself does not upload your archive. If you connect an AI client, memories returned to that client may be sent to its model provider under that client's settings.

Start your vault

You need uv and a terminal. Copy your supported local sessions and chosen browser history into a vault:

uvx --from git+https://github.com/sandoreclegane/inkvault inkvault sync

In a terminal, InkVault greets you, asks which browser profiles are yours before reading their history, shows progress while it builds search, and ends with a short summary. It downloads the search model on first use (about 130 MB). When everything saved, the Memory Atlas opens by itself. Add --no-open to skip that. For later visits, inkvault dashboard opens the Atlas again:

uvx --from git+https://github.com/sandoreclegane/inkvault inkvault dashboard

Search for something you remember, select a result, and read it in context. Add inkvault schedule to refresh and back up your vault nightly, or connect your AI tools to search it from a conversation.

Have a Pieces archive to save? See Rescuing from Pieces.

What InkVault preserves

With a nightly schedule, InkVault reads the session files Claude Code and Codex already keep on disk, and the history of the browser profiles you chose, and copies in what's new: what you asked, what the assistant answered, what each session was called, and which pages you opened. Your AI tools can then search what they helped you with, and what you were reading, last month or last year, long after the original files are gone.

• Claude Code: every project, from ~/.claude/projects. Synced messages stay in your vault after source cleanup.
• Codex: every session it saved, from ~/.codex/sessions.
• Claude desktop app (agent mode, Windows): including prompts only its audit log kept.
• Your browsers: Chrome, Edge, Comet, Brave, Arc, Vivaldi, Opera and Firefox, only the profiles you say are yours (how). Kept past the browser's own cleanup.

Only what's new since the last sync is added. Tool output and attachments are left out, and sign-in codes and tokens are cleaned out of web addresses (see Privacy).

What you get

• A vault you own: preserved sessions, chosen browser history, optional screen activity, and any rescued Pieces records in one local SQLite file, vault.db. Keep it independently of the tools that produced it.
• Search for your AI tools: an MCP server with search_memories (keyword + meaning, merged), timeline ("what was I doing in March?"), get_memory, and memory_stats.
• Memory Atlas: open it with inkvault dashboard (or the InkVault Atlas icon from inkvault dashboard --shortcut on Windows). It shows your year: active hours per day (hover a day for what it was about), when you work, how your projects connect, projects and topics over time, top apps and sites. Every chart has a table view. A Search view finds things across your vault and opens the original in a reader. It runs on this computer only (127.0.0.1, a private link, stops when idle) and needs no internet.
• Daily Light (v0.3.2): a daily quotation from 32 curated public-domain passages, chosen by your local date, without using your history. Hide it for the current Atlas session. When indexed activity exists on today's date in an earlier year, On this day opens it in Search. You can also browse any date range by setting both From and To without entering a keyword. These date-browsing additions are Atlas-only; MCP tools are unchanged.
• Your Claude Code, Codex and Claude desktop sessions: your prompts and the replies, side by side with your other preserved history, searchable as chats (named like Claude Code · project: title), and part of the timeline, the digests and the dashboard.
• Your browser history: pages you opened in Chrome, Edge, Comet, Brave, Arc, Vivaldi, Opera or Firefox, from the browser profiles you say are yours. Visits already copied stay in the vault after the browser removes them. Searchable as web, on the timeline, in the digests and on the dashboard.
• Screen capture (optional, Windows): a timeline of the windows you used, plus the text of the windows in apps you choose. No images are kept. See Screen capture.
• Daily digests (optional): a 2-3 sentence summary of each day, written by a *local* model through Ollama. Summarize your preserved activity without sending it to a hosted model.

Connect your AI tools

Claude Code

claude mcp add inkvault --scope user -- uvx --from git+https://github.com/sandoreclegane/inkvault inkvault serve

Codex (~/.codex/config.toml)

[mcp_servers.inkvault]

command = "uvx" args = ["--from", "git+https://github.com/sandoreclegane/inkvault", "inkvault", "serve"]

Hermes, Claude Desktop, and other MCP clients: run uvx --from git+https://github.com/sandoreclegane/inkvault inkvault serve over stdio.

Then ask: *"What was I working on the week of March 10?"*, *"Find that retry helper I saved"*, *"When did I last look at the Stripe dashboard?"*

Your browser history

A browser profile can belong to someone else, so InkVault reads none until you choose:

inkvault browsers

It lists every profile it finds (browser, name, signed-in email) and asks which are yours. sync and rescue ask too when they find a new one; the nightly run never asks, and skips profiles you haven't chosen. If someone else starts using a browser on this computer, run inkvault browsers again: InkVault notices a profile that was replaced on Windows and macOS, and when a profile's signed-in account changes, but it can't always tell.

• inkvault browsers --no "chrome/Profile 2" --forget stops copying a profile and removes what was copied, even after the browser is uninstalled.
• inkvault browsers --skip-site mybank.com never keeps that site or its subdomains, and removes what's there.

Removing rebuilds search and the dashboard and deletes the digests for each removed visit's day (in UTC) and the day either side. If it's interrupted, the next inkvault sync, inkvault index or nightly run finishes it, and search stays off until then. It can't recall an answer your AI tool already received, or a dashboard tab that's already open. The nightly backups still hold the removed visits until they rotate out (7 nights).

What's kept: each page's address and title, and when you opened it. Before anything is stored, InkVault removes parts of addresses that carry sign-in codes, tokens, signed links, password-reset tokens, and your email or username. Searches (?q=…) stay. This catches the common shapes, not every possible secret. Copying happens while the browser runs, so the newest few visits can wait for the next sync.

Safari isn't supported yet (macOS blocks reading it without Full Disk Access).

Screen capture (Windows)

With inkvault watch, you can add a local timeline of foreground windows and read text from apps you choose. Screen capture stays off until you install the watcher. It's Windows-only for now; on macOS and Linux inkvault watch says so and exits.

What it records

• A timeline, everywhere. Every foreground window becomes a *stretch*: the app, a cleaned title, and when it started and ended. A window you only flick through isn't kept, and time you're away (no input for 5 minutes, or the screen is locked) isn't counted.
• Text, in apps you choose. After you settle on a window for 30 seconds, InkVault reads its text (Windows' own OCR, on your machine) and stores it if it changed. A given window is read at most every 2 minutes.
• No images, ever. The window image exists in memory just long enough to read, and is never written to disk.
• Before anything is stored, secrets in titles and text (API keys, tokens, JWTs, password: ... values) are masked and URLs are cleaned. This catches the common shapes, not every possible secret.

Which apps get text. By default: Comet and Edge; Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Codex; Windows Terminal, VS Code and Cursor; Notion, Obsidian and Notepad; and the Microsoft 365 apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, new Outlook, OneNote). Every other app is timeline-only. Two groups are off until you say yes, and --install asks:

• Messaging apps (Discord, WhatsApp, Telegram, Teams, LinkedIn). Reading them stores other people's messages and names, and Discord's title is the name of the person you're talking to. Off unless you answer yes.
• Chrome. Its window title is just the page and "Google Chrome", with no profile name, so InkVault can't tell your Chrome profiles from anyone else's. Off unless you answer yes.

Without a terminal (for example a scripted install) both stay off. You can add or remove any app yourself.

Everyone using the Windows account is captured. The watcher runs in the account that installed it, from sign-in. If anyone else uses that account, what they do is recorded too. Use a separate Windows account for anyone who shouldn't be.

Never captured. Password managers and Windows' sign-in and permission prompts (1Password, Bitwarden, KeePass, KeePassXC, the lock screen, UAC) are skipped entirely: no stretch, no text. So are windows whose title contains InPrivate, Incognito or Private Browsing, and anything you add with --never-app or --never-title.

Install

uv tool install "inkvault[screen]"

inkvault watch --apps # preview: shows the settings, records nothing inkvault watch --install # asks about messaging apps and Chrome, then starts at every sign-in

--apps is a preview: it shows which apps get text and which are never captured, and starts nothing. --install registers a Task Scheduler task that starts the watcher at sign-in, restarts it if it stops, and checks it's really running before it says "screen capture is on". It also adds two desktop shortcuts: *Pause screen capture (1 hour)* and *Resume screen capture*. Without the screen extra (or without an OCR language installed in Windows) the watcher still records the timeline, and inkvault status says why there's no text.

Controls

| `inkvault watch --never-ap