paulcretu / rem

An open source approach to locally record and enable searching everything you view on your Mac.

rem

🧠 Remember everything. (very alpha - download anyway)

Original Demo

An open source approach to locally record everything you view on your Mac (prefer other platforms? come help build xrem, cross-platform version of this project).

Note: Only tested on Apple Silicon, but there is now an intel build

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This is crazy alpha version (rem could use your help!)

Please log any bugs / issues you find!

Looking at this code and grimacing? Want to help turn this project into something awesome? Please contribute. I haven't written Swift since 2017. I'm sure you'll write better code than me.

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I think the idea of recording everything you see has the potential to change how we interact with our computers, and believe it should be open source.

Also, from a privacy / security perspective, this is like... pretty scary stuff, and I want the code open so we know for certain that nothing is leaving your laptop. Even telemetry has the potential to leak private info.

This is 100% local. Please, read the code yourself.

Also, that means there is no tracking / analytics of any kind, which means I don't know you're running into bugs when you do. So please report any / all you find!

Getting Started

• Download the latest release, or build it yourself!
• Launch the app
• Click the brain
• Click "Start Remembering"
• Grant it access to "Screen Recording" i.e. take screenshots every 2 seconds
• Click "Open timeline" or "Cmd + Scroll Up" to open the timeline view
  • Scroll left or right to move in time
• Click "Search" to open the search view
  • Search your history and click on a thumbnail to go there in the timeline
• In timeline, give Live Text a second and then you can select text
• Click "Copy Recent Context" to grab a prompt for interacting with an LLM with what you've seen recently as context
• Click "Show Me My Data" to open a finder window where rem stores SQLite db + video recordings
• Click "Purge All Data" to delete everything (useful if something breaks)

(that should be all that's needed)

Build it yourself

• Clone the repo git clone --recursive -j8 https://github.com/jasonjmcghee/rem.git or run git submodule update --init --recursive after cloning
• Open project in Xcode
• Product > Archive
• Distribute App
• Custom
• Copy App

Currently supports:

• Going back in time (full-screen scrubber of everything you've viewed)
• Copy text from back in time
• Search everything you've viewed (with filter by application)
• Easily grab recent context for use with LLMs

Things I'd love to add:

• Natural language search / agent interaction via updating local vector embedding
  • I've also been exploring novel approaches to vector dbs
• Novel search experiences like spatial / similar images
• More search filters (by time, etc.)
• Fine-grained purging / trimming / selecting recording
• Multi-monitor support

FAQ

• Where is my data?
  • Click "Show Me My Data" in the tray / status icon menu
  • Currently it is stored in: ~/Library/Containers/today.jason.rem/Data/Library/Application Support/today.jason.rem
  • It was originally: ~/Library/Application\ Support/today.jason.rem/

(Never)AQ

• Wow that logo is so great, you're an artist. Can I see your figma?
  • So nice of you to say, sure here it is

XCode + copy / paste from history:

Screen.Recording.2023-12-27.at.8.38.07.PM.mov