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.

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.

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
• ⌘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. 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.