Brainstead

A home for everything on your mind: tasks, notes and an LLM wiki that writes itself, over a folder of plain markdown.

Brainstead is a Mac and Windows app for Getting Things Done, notes and an LLM wiki, all in one folder of markdown files (your vault) that other markdown editors can open too. Your tasks are - [ ] lines in your notes, gathered into GTD lists. AI assistants you already have on your computer (Claude Code, Codex, Copilot, Antigravity) answer from the vault, build wiki pages from your sources with every claim quoted, and make changes for you, each listed with Revert.

See it on the Brainstead website, and learn it step by step with the tutorials: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced and Power user.

Download

Mac

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

1. Download Brainstead.dmg from the latest release.
2. Open it and drag Brainstead onto Applications.
3. Open Brainstead from Applications. macOS says it can't check the app for malicious software, because it isn't notarised by Apple. Click Done.
4. Open System Settings › Privacy & Security, scroll down and click Open Anyway beside Brainstead, then Open Anyway again and enter your password.
5. The first screen asks for Full Disk Access. A vault in a cloud-synced folder (OneDrive, iCloud Drive, Dropbox) needs it, or macOS asks for each folder; you can skip it. Then choose your vault folder, or click Create a new vault for a new one with a few example notes to try things on.

Windows

For Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit). WebView2, which it runs in, is already part of both.

1. Download Brainstead_x64-setup.exe from the latest release.
2. Run it. It installs for your user only, with no administrator rights.
3. The installer isn't signed yet, so SmartScreen shows "Windows protected your PC". Click More info, then Run anyway.
4. Open Brainstead from the Start menu. There is no Full Disk Access step on Windows: choose your vault folder, or click Create a new vault for a new one with a few example notes to try things on.

Brainstead opens a vault you choose read-only (a new one it makes for you opens writable). When you're ready for it to change files (ticking tasks, saving notes), turn off Read-only in Settings › Vault. See First run. To build it yourself instead, see Building it.

Brainstead checks for a new version once a day and offers to install it, on a Mac and on Windows; Brainstead › Check for Updates… (Settings › About › Check for Updates… on Windows) checks now.

What it does

• Today and GTD. Today sums up your day in a sentence and shows what's overdue, due, coming up this week and waiting. Quick capture (⌃⌥Space on a Mac, Ctrl+Shift+Space on Windows) works from any app. The Inbox, Tasks, Projects and a guided weekly review do the rest. Tasks and GTD
• Notes. Read in View, write in Edit or Source. Wikilinks, tags, callouts, maths, diagrams, Tasks queries, Dataview and Templater all work. Saving never reformats what you didn't change, and won't overwrite a file changed elsewhere. Notes
• A wiki built from your sources. Ingest emails, Teams chats, PDFs, Office files and images, and the assistant writes wiki pages with every claim quoted from its source. Brainstead checks each quote. The wiki and sources
• Teams and Outlook, captured for you (macOS and Windows). Capture what's open with the Chrome extensions, or turn on Teams and Outlook sync to read your own chats, meeting transcripts, Inbox mail and calendar into sources/ on their own — using your open Teams tab's sign-in, reading only, no Microsoft Graph. Teams and Outlook sync
• Ask. Chat with your assistant about your vault, or let it drive Brainstead from a terminal. It can do almost anything you can do in the app. It can add images for the notes it writes, too. Every change is listed in Changes, where you can revert it. Ask and assistants
• Tools. Draft reply drafts an answer to an email or Teams thread for you to send. Meeting notes turns a Teams transcript into a meeting note. Compare checks a document against the policy it must follow (Doc check), or compares any two documents. Meeting notes and the other tools
• Day to day. A menu-bar icon (a system tray icon on Windows), scheduled daily and weekly summaries, a daily check of the wiki, and help on every screen ().

Features has the first run, the window and the keys.

Licence

Brainstead is free software under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later: you may use, share and change it, and anything you pass on must stay free under the same licence. See Licence and credits.

Building it

On a Mac you need Rust, Node.js and Xcode's command-line tools.

npm install
make dev          # run it with hot reload
make install-app  # build it and put it in /Applications

On Windows you need Rust (rustup, stable-msvc), Visual Studio Build Tools with the "Desktop development with C++" workload, Node.js 22 or later, Python 3 (as python3 on your PATH) and ruff. There is no make on Windows.

npm ci
npm run tauri dev      # run it with hot reload
python tools/check.py  # the full check
npm run tauri build    # the installer, in src-tauri/target/release/bundle/nsis/
python tools/install_windows.py  # build it and install it for your user

Development has the rest: signing, the checks, the MCP server, evals, screenshots and where things live.