MindForger Documentation

Are you drowning in information, but starving for knowledge?

Where do you keep your private remarks like ideas, personal plans, exam preparation notes, gift tips, how-tos, dreams, business visions, finance strategies, meeting minutes and auto coaching notes? Loads of documents, sketches and remarks spread around the file system, cloud, web and Post-it notes? Are you afraid of your knowledge privacy? Are you able to find particular remarks once you create them? Do you know how are the remarks mutually related when you browse, read or write them? No?

MindForger is thinking notebook and Markdown editor:

• Installation
• Getting started
• YouTube tutorials
• User documentation
• Developer documentation
• History
• FAQs

MindForger aims to be human mind inspired personal knowledge management tool:

• Human mind
  • MindForger aims to mimic human mind - learning, recalling, recognition, associations, forgetting - in order to achieve synergy with your mind to make your searching, reading and writing more productive.
• Personal
  • MindForger enables you to own your personal data - it's meant to store your personal ideas, remarks, notes and plans in a secure way while it respects your privacy.
  • MindForger does not compete with tools for sharing information like Wikis - its primary purpose is to maintain your private data.
• Knowledge
  • MindForger seeks knowledge hidden in your remarks to enable its mining and personal machine learning models creation.
• Management
  • MindForger starts where editors and search engines end. It thinks as you search, browse, read and write. Once you find a remark, MindForger brings its associations. As you browse notes and read them it looks up related relevant knowledge in your notebooks. If you edit a remark, MindForger brings associations as you write. It reminds you about existing content related to the text being written.
  • MindForger is integrated with local large language models, which brings note-taking and knowledge management to a new level. With the integration, MindForger allows you to easily expand your notes and knowledge by leveraging the power of artificial intelligence. Whether you need to write an in-depth analysis, draft a blog post, or simply generate ideas. Large language model can fix grammar, translate, write, reformulate, summarize, suggest synonyms and antonyms, and much more. You can now effortlessly generate high-quality content, enhance the organization of your knowledge, and collaborate seamlessly with others, all within a single platform. MindForger has you covered.
• Tool
  • MindForger is a desktop application which runs on Linux, macOS and Windows.

Features:

• Associations
  • MindForger thinks as you read and write. While you work on a Note, MindForger associates it with related Notes from your whole workspace - including those you forgot you ever wrote. Associations are computed locally, with no cloud and no LLM required.
• Autolinking
  • Links that write themselves. Names of Notebooks and Notes mentioned in your text are automatically turned into links in the preview - your hand-written links are rendered in blue, generated ones in green - so that your knowledge gets interconnected without any extra effort - no need to manually create links, Wiki camel case words or other linking conventions.
• Private AI
  • Assistant that doesn't send your notes anywhere. Wingman runs open-weight Large Language Models - like gpt-oss, Llama, GLM or Qwen - privately on your machine via ollama to summarize, explain, translate, rewrite, fix grammar, generate tags or find tasks in the Notes you read and write.
• Keyboard First
  • Keep your hands on the keyboard. MindForger is designed to be used without a mouse - almost every action has a keyboard shortcut and every menu item has an accelerator. Recall a Notebook or Note by name in a few keystrokes, easily restructure the outline, complete links to Notes as you type or run commands. Your thoughts flow straight from your mind to your notes.
• Stencils
  • Start from structure, not from a blank page. Create Notebooks from stencils - meeting minutes, software analysis and design documents, S.M.A.R.T.E.R. goals or the GROW model - and capture thoughts as one of 16 typed Notes like idea, question, lesson, task or SWOT. Add your own stencils and Note types to fit how you think.
• Refactoring
  • Refactor your thinking like source code. MindForger brings IDE style features to your notes - clone, promote, demote, move and extract Notes within one Markdown file or across many of them, using keyboard shortcuts for extreme efficiency and speed.
• Knowledge Graph
  • Walk through your knowledge. The knowledge graph navigator renders Notebooks, Notes, tags and their relationships as an interactive force-directed graph which you can explore node by node - like implicit mind map.
• Organizers
  • Know what to do next. Kanban boards and Eisenhower matrix organizers sort your Notebooks and Notes by their tags - TODO, WIP, DONE or urgent and important - so you don't need another task management app. Notebook shelves then let you group Notebooks to as many named shelves as you need. From Notes to Notebooks, from Notebooks to priorities and actions.
• No Lock-in
  • Your files, your tools. Everything is plain Markdown on your disk. Open a MindForger workspace, any existing Markdown directory or just a single Markdown file. Synchronize, share, back up and encrypt your knowledge with the tools you trust - own Git server, private GitHub or Bitbucket repository, or cloud drive of your choice.
• Math & Diagrams
  • Markdown editor with live preview, syntax highlighting, offline KaTeX math and Mermaid diagrams, spell check, emojis, Emacs keybindings, paragraph rewrap, hoist mode and the option to edit a Note in your favorite external editor.
• Docs Library
  • Index directories with PDF documents as Notebooks, keep them in sync and detect orphaned documents. Study, read and annotate your PDFs conveniently connected with your remarks.
• Export
  • Export Notebooks to HTML or Markdown, or your whole workspace to CSV with one-hot encoded tags - ready for your machine learning and analytics tools.
• Fast & Native
  • Written in C++ and Qt, works completely offline and runs on Linux, macOS and Windows.

MindForger has been released on the day of my 42nd birthday to confirm answer to the Ultimate Question of life, the Universe, and Everything, however, the project has longer history.