You can picture it. Dark screen, one bright accent, something about onboarding. You cannot name the file, the app it came from, or the day. That's not a failure of memory. It's how memory works.
Shelf is built to take that half-memory as the query.
Free. macOS 14 and later, Apple Silicon and Intel. No account.
What you remember“dark dashboard, one accent colour, onboarding”
No filename
No exact words
Maybe last summer
01 · Vague memory
Search asks for certainty you don't have.
A search field expects a keyword. Your memory offers an impression. So you type your best guess, get nothing, guess again, then give up and rebuild the thing from scratch, which is the most expensive possible outcome.
Shelf's premise is simpler: describe what you remember, in the words you actually have.
02 · Five handles
What people actually remember.
Almost every real recall starts from one of these. Shelf indexes all five, so any one of them is a usable way in.
What it looked like
Dark, dense, a chart, a photograph, a red button. Appearance is often the last thing to fade.
When you saw it
Not a date, a season. Around the launch. The week everything broke. Shelf keeps the day so “last summer” narrows the field.
Where you saw it
A site, an app, a chat, a PDF someone sent. Shelf records the source at capture.
What project it belonged to
The work you were doing at the time is usually the strongest handle of all.
What sat near it
The article you read the same hour, the note you wrote after. Neighbours lead to the thing.
Recall isn't a keyword. It's a description that gets warmer.
03 · A real recall
How one search actually goes.
Step one“dark dashboard onboarding”Shelf matches by meaning, not spelling. Twelve candidates, sorted by how close they feel.
Step twoNarrow by timeYou remember it was warm out. Filtering to last summer leaves four.
Step threeRecognise itYou don't read the results. You see the one you meant, because Shelf kept the preview.
Step fourFollow the neighboursOpening it shows the article and the note from the same afternoon. That's the part you'd forgotten you needed.
04 · What works today
Honest about the edges.
Shipped today: search by meaning across text, notes, page content and text read out of images and PDFs; filtering by time and source; previews you can recognise at a glance; and the related items around anything you open.
Still growing: how deeply Shelf understands people, companies and documents as entities. It gets better with each release rather than pretending to be finished.
Next thought
One handle is rarely enough. Real recall is assembled from pieces.
Shelf V3 is the current build. Shelf does not use automatic updates, so download the latest build here and install it over your current version.
This is intentional. Shelf is built around a local-first, privacy-focused philosophy. An automatic updater requires additional background processes, network connections, update infrastructure, and another system with permission to modify the app. We prefer to keep Shelf’s network footprint and background activity as small as possible.
Manual updates keep the process explicit: Shelf only checks the internet when a feature actually needs it, and you decide when a new version is downloaded and installed.