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.

The + menu does the rest — at the top left on the Mac and iPad, and along the bottom of a drawer on iPhone. Its first group puts things in the drawer you’re looking at: New Note, Add Link…, Add Files…, Add Photos… on iPhone and iPad, and Paste. Its second group makes places: New Drawer…, New Cabinet… and Import…, which on iPhone are also in the library screen’s own +. While a whole cabinet or several drawers are selected, the first group is greyed out, since there’s no single drawer for a note to land in.

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

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.

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:

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.

Paste a link, drop one in, or choose Add Link… from the + menu (or File ▸ Add Link…, ⇧⌘L, on the Mac) and type its address. You can leave off the https://: youtube.com/watch?v=… is enough. On the Mac, a link already on the clipboard fills the box for you.

That’s also how a YouTube video gets onto an iPhone or iPad: copy its link and use Add Link… or Paste, or share it from the YouTube app or Safari to Add to MindDrawer.

A new link is named after the page’s own title once MindDrawer has fetched it, so the name is there to edit in the inspector. A name you type yourself is kept.

Each new link also saves a copy of its page, so it still reads the same if the page changes or disappears. Open the link and switch between Live, the page as it is now, and Archive, the copy kept when you filed it. A link filed before archives existed has a Save Archive button there instead. YouTube and Vimeo links play rather than archive.

To point a link somewhere else, choose Edit Link… in its context menu, or click the pencil beside the address in the inspector. The page’s title, picture and description are fetched again for the new address; a name that was only the old page’s title is replaced, and one you typed stays. The arrow beside the pencil fetches them again for the same address. On the Mac, ⌘Z puts the old address back.

A text or Markdown file lands in Files. To read and edit it in place, right-click it and choose Convert to Note, and it moves to Notes. Source code and other text-based formats aren’t offered this, since they’re more useful as files. Undo turns it back into a file.

Three ways to read a drawer

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

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, full screen; its own details are behind the info button there, and swiping moves to the next or previous item.

Setting up the assistant

On the Mac, iPhone and iPad, 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 the device’s Keychain and never synced, so each Mac, iPhone or iPad needs it added once.

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. On iPad it’s the same speech-bubble button and the same pane; on iPhone the button opens the conversation as a sheet, with Clear to start over and Done to put it away.

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, on the Mac, drag it straight to the Finder or Mail. On iPhone and iPad, Save… opens the share sheet, with Save to Files in it. Three kinds:

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.

New Drawer… and New Cabinet… ask for a name first. Leave the box empty and the new one takes the name shown in it, like “Drawer 4”. A new drawer goes in the cabinet you’re in, or in the cabinet you chose it from.

Select a cabinet and the pane shows its drawers as picture cards, each with what it holds. Right-click a card (touch and hold on iPhone and iPad) to open, rename, label or delete it.

To rename one, choose Rename in its context menu. On the Mac the name becomes editable in place; on iPhone and iPad a box opens with the name in it.

Deleting a drawer or a cabinet asks first, and says how much goes with it — every drawer in a cabinet and every item in those drawers. On the Mac ⌘Z brings it all back; on iPhone and iPad it can’t be undone, so the question matters more there.

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.

Files, pictures, recordings and video also have Open a Copy and Save a Copy…, in their context menu and in the viewer’s ⋯ menu. Open a Copy opens a copy in the app that normally handles that kind of file, so editing it there leaves the original in your library as it was. On iPhone and iPad it asks which app to open it in.

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 + 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

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….

Something not covered?

Email ben.dansby@gmail.com.