MindDrawer documentation

MindDrawer keeps the things a project accumulates — the notes, the links, the screenshots, the voice memo you left yourself, the PDF someone sent. You drop them in and they file themselves. There is nothing to arrange and nothing to maintain.

Installing

Open the downloaded MindDrawer.dmg and drag MindDrawer to your Applications folder. It needs macOS 15 or later. The iPhone and iPad app needs iOS 17 or later.

The idea

Most tools for this are either a canvas, where you place things and then spend forever keeping the placement tidy, or a folder tree, where every new item is a small decision about where it belongs. MindDrawer is neither. It is a drawer organizer: every item lands in the felt-lined compartment for its kind, and it stays there.

You never decide where anything goes. The one placement decision left is which drawer something belongs in, and even that has a default — whichever drawer you are looking at.

An empty compartment stays visible, with its name on the rail. That is deliberate: the empty fork slot is what tells you where forks go. A section that disappears when empty can only be learned by accident.

Putting things in

Drop anything onto the drawer — a file, a folder of files, a picture from a web page, a chunk of selected text, a URL. On the Mac you can also paste with ⌘V, or use the + menu for a new note.

MindDrawer copies what you give it into its own library, so the drawer keeps working after you move, rename or delete the original.

Filing from the menu bar

On the Mac, MindDrawer can put a drawer icon in the menu bar, so you can file something without finding the window first. Turn on Show in menu bar in Settings ▸ General.

• Drag toward the icon with a file, a picture, a link or some text, and a list of your drawers opens just beneath it. Let go on a drawer and it’s filed there, exactly as if you’d dropped it into the drawer itself.
• Let go on the icon itself to file into the last drawer you picked from the menu bar. Until you’ve picked one, choose from the list.
• Click the icon to see every drawer. Click one to open it in the window.

The list opens as you approach the icon, before you reach the menu bar, so you don’t have to drag all the way to the top edge of the screen.

While it’s on, closing the window leaves MindDrawer running, so the icon stays available. Quit from the MindDrawer menu or the Dock when you’re done.

The six compartments

Every drawer has the same six, and what a thing is decides which one it lands in:

• Notes — text you typed, and Markdown or plain-text files.
• Links — web pages, with their title, description and thumbnail fetched for you.
• Pictures — images and screenshots.
• Video — video files, and YouTube or Vimeo links, which play in place.
• Recordings — sound files and voice memos, with a waveform.
• Files — documents and everything else, shown with the icon the Finder would give them.

A link that turns out to be a video goes to Video rather than Links, because that is what it is. Same for a link that points straight at an image or a podcast episode.

Three ways to read a drawer

• Tray (⌘1) — every compartment, empty ones included, with uniform cards. The one that teaches you the shape of a drawer.
• List (⌘2) — dense rows, grouped by compartment, empties omitted. Best when a drawer has a lot in it.
• Bento (⌘3) — every item at its natural size in one mosaic, containers sized by how much they hold.

The choice is a preference, not part of the drawer, so it doesn’t change for anyone else or travel between libraries.

Search

Type in the search field at the top of the sidebar and the cabinets give way to results. It searches titles and notes, and also inside things: the words in a screenshot, the text in a PDF, and the transcript of a recording if you asked for one.

All of that reading happens on your own device, in the background, and only ever feeds search.

Labels

Seven labels, each with a name you choose in Settings. Rename one and everything wearing it updates at once, because items store the slot rather than the colour.

There are two label filters and they do different jobs: the one beside the search field narrows which drawers the sidebar shows, and the one in the toolbar narrows which items the drawer shows.

The inspector

The pane on the right describes whatever is selected: its title, a note-to-self, which drawer it’s filed under, its label, and whatever was found inside it. Select a drawer or a cabinet instead and it describes that — its name, what it’s for, and what it holds.

On iPhone it’s the info button, and it always describes the drawer or cabinet. Tapping an item opens the item itself.

Setting up the assistant

On the Mac, MindDrawer can answer questions about your library with Claude, Anthropic’s AI model. It’s off until you want it: open Settings ▸ Claude, switch on Enable the assistant, and paste in an Anthropic API key — get one from Anthropic if you don’t have one. Questions are billed to your own Anthropic account; there’s no subscription through me.

The same pane picks the model, from Claude Opus 5.5 (the default) to the faster, cheaper Claude Haiku 4.5, and holds the Let Claude change the library switch. The key is kept in this Mac’s Keychain and never synced.

Asking

Press ⌥⌘F, choose View ▸ Ask Claude…, or click the speech-bubble button in the toolbar. The Ask sidebar opens in the inspector’s place on the right; the ⓘ button switches back.

Ask about anything you’ve filed. Claude always knows which drawer or cabinet you’re looking at, so “what’s still undecided here?” means this drawer, while “which drawer has the most files?” reaches across the whole library. It searches for what it needs — including the words in pictures and PDFs and the transcripts of recordings — rather than reading everything at once.

Answers name the items, drawers and cabinets they came from as links. Click one and MindDrawer opens it: the drawer comes up, the item is selected, and the sidebar scrolls to show where it lives. The conversation stays put while you look, so you can check a source and carry on. Follow-up questions work; the trash button in the sidebar starts over.

Answers can be wrong, so treat them as a pointer to the items rather than the last word.

Changes Claude makes

With Let Claude change the library on (it is, once the assistant is enabled), you can ask for the tidying itself: “file a note with these three steps in The Brief”, “move everything about the ferry to Getting Around”, “label the finished ones Project 1”, “make a cabinet for next year’s trip”. Claude can file notes and links; edit, move, relabel and delete items; and make, rename, move and delete drawers and cabinets.

Everything one answer changed is listed under it, and the whole lot undoes in one step — with the Undo Changes button there, or ⌘Z. Claude is told to change only what you asked for and to ask when a request is unclear, and it won’t act on instructions written inside your own items. Turn the switch off and it only answers.

Exports

Ask for something out of your library and it appears under the answer as a file with a Save… button — or drag it straight to the Finder or Mail. Three kinds:

• A document Claude writes from what it read: “a CSV of every link with its title”, “a Markdown summary of this drawer”, JSON, HTML or plain text.
• The original files, in a folder: pictures, recordings, videos and files as themselves, notes as Markdown, links as web locations — “all the photos from The Trip”.
• A .drawer package of a drawer or cabinet, to import on another Mac.

Exports work whether or not changes are allowed, since they don’t touch the library. Nothing is written anywhere until you choose where it goes.

Drawers and cabinets

A drawer is one topic: a project, a trip, a person. A cabinet is a folder of drawers. That is the whole hierarchy, and it grows at the top rather than the bottom — there are no sub-groups inside a drawer, because that would be the canvas coming back through a side door.

Both are organised only by naming them. Sort order is one setting for the whole library.

Moving and reordering

On the Mac, drag a card to reorder it within its compartment. To move something to a different drawer, use Move to Drawer in its context menu — it’s a menu item rather than a drag, because dragging between two things you can’t see at once is a guess.

Arrange mode on iPhone and iPad

A touchscreen has one long press and two things that want it, so reordering is a mode you enter deliberately. Long-press a tile and choose Select: the tiles start to jiggle, the rest of the screen steps back, and from there a tap ticks, a drag reorders, and the bar along the bottom moves, labels or deletes whatever you ticked. Done leaves.

Outside that mode, a long press gives you the ordinary context menu.

Getting things out

Drag anything out of MindDrawer — to the Finder, into an email, onto another app — and you get the real file, named readably rather than as the identifier it’s stored under. For files there is also Save a Copy… and Open in Default App.

Syncing

Off until you turn it on, in Settings ▸ Sync. When it’s on, your library travels between your Mac, iPhone and iPad through your own iCloud account.

Each drawer syncs as its own record, so two devices editing different drawers merge cleanly instead of one overwriting the other. Deleting a drawer on one device deletes it on the others rather than quietly coming back.

Large files are the one thing you get a say in: carry everything, carry only what’s under a size you choose, or carry none of them. An item whose file didn’t travel still appears, with its title, notes and searchable text — it just says Not on this device where the picture would be.

The share extension

Add to MindDrawer appears in Share menus across the system. Pick a drawer and it’s filed; the next time MindDrawer is open, it’s there. It defaults to the drawer you used last, so the common case is one tap.

Import and export

A .drawer package carries cabinets between libraries — a way to hand a project to someone else or move it between two libraries of your own. Import… is in the sidebar’s + menu; exporting is in the context menu of any cabinet or drawer, and in the inspector.

Importing copies the assets in and gives them fresh identities, so importing the same package twice gives you two independent copies rather than two things sharing one file.

Keyboard

• ⌘F — jump to search
• ⌥⌘F — ask Claude (once the assistant is enabled)
• ⌘1 / ⌘2 / ⌘3 — tray, list, bento
• ⇧⌘N — new note
• ⇧⌘D — new drawer  ·  ⌥⌘N — new cabinet
• ⇧⌘V — paste into the drawer
• Space or double-click — open the selected item
• ⌘Z — undo, including deletions

Privacy

MindDrawer has no analytics, no telemetry and no account. Reading the text inside your pictures, PDFs and recordings happens on your own device. If you turn on the Claude assistant, your questions and the parts of your library needed to answer them go to Anthropic under your own API key; nothing is sent while it’s off. The full details are in the privacy policy.

Updates

The direct download checks bendansby.com for updates and can install them itself — Check for Updates… is in the MindDrawer menu.

Licensing

The direct download is free to try with nothing held back: no cap on drawers, no watermark, no feature switched off. After a week it will occasionally remind you that a license exists. Buying one stops the reminders; enter the key under MindDrawer ▸ Enter License….

MindDrawer is also in my bundles, and a bundle key activates it here too.

Something not covered?

Email ben.dansby@gmail.com.