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Use case

Bookmarks should remember why you saved them.

A URL preserves an address. It does not preserve the sentence that made you stop, or the project you were thinking about at the time.

Shelf is not a bookmark manager. Links are simply one kind of memory it can hold, next to everything else.

Download ShelfSee how it works

01 · The problem

A bookmark bar full of blue words.

Titles are written by the site, not by you. Six months later they read like someone else's notes.

02 · The old way

Folders of links you never reopen.

Read-later apps solve queueing. They rarely solve retrieval, because they still index the title and little else.

03 · Shelf

Keep the page, keep the reason.

  • You savea long article about interface density
  • Shelf keepsthe page text, the source and the moment
  • Shelf connectsthe note you wrote that evening
  • You later ask for“the dense UI argument I liked”

04 · Memory

A link with its contents attached.

Page text
Fetched when you save the link, then indexed locally.
Meaning
A local summary and topic instead of just a title.
Source
The site it came from.
Neighbours
Other things you kept in the same session or about the same topic.

05 · Retrieval

Find the argument, not the address.

You search for what the page said. The link comes back with the things you saved around it.

06 · Privacy

One honest detail.

Saving a link fetches that page, because that is what saving a link means. Everything after that, reading, indexing and connecting, happens on your Mac.

Save the page and the point.

Let your links keep their context instead of becoming a list of titles.

Download Shelf

Free. macOS 14 and later, Apple Silicon and Intel. No account.

Keep reading

Shelf V3 is out now

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.

Download the latest version →Version 3.0 · macOS 14+