User guide

Memtrove indexes the files and browser bookmarks on your Mac so you can find them by name, by content, or by meaning — and so Claude can find them for you. The index stays on your Mac. Nothing is uploaded.

Requirements: macOS 13 or later on a Mac with Apple silicon (M-series chip).

Install

1. Download the Memtrove DMG, open it, and drag Memtrove onto the Applications folder on the right.

2. Open Memtrove. The first time, a five-step setup walks you through it. Every step after the first can be skipped and done later in Settings:

   Step	What it does
   Welcome	A short introduction
   Full Disk Access	Turn on Memtrove under System Settings › Privacy & Security › Full Disk Access. The setup notices when you do and shows "Access granted". Memtrove works without it, but protected folders such as Documents, Desktop and Downloads are skipped, and macOS may keep asking for permission
   Semantic model	Starts downloading the Standard model (about 130 MB) as soon as you reach this step; after that it runs fully offline. You can continue right away — the download finishes in the background
   Connect Claude	Optional. The card shows the config file that will change; nothing is written until you click Connect, and the original is backed up
   Done	Shows the ⌥ + Space shortcut and indexing progress

Searching

From anywhere

Press ⌥ Space in any app. A quick search panel appears near the top of the screen; just type. In the panel:

Clicking outside the panel also closes it.

What you can type

You can combine them, for example last month in Downloads "net 30 days".

Results and preview

• Each result says why it matched — In content, In file name or By meaning — and the matching words are highlighted.
• Files that were just added and haven't been read yet show "Indexing content"; until then they can only be found by name.
• Under the search field you can filter by kind (All / Files / Folders / Bookmarks, ⌘ ⌥ 1–4) and by time. Files doesn't include folders.
• Folders are found by name. Selecting one shows what's directly inside it; double-click or ↵ opens it in Finder. The timeline doesn't list folders.
• Pages, Numbers and Keynote documents (.pages / .numbers / .key) are found by name only; open them to see their contents.
• Renaming or moving a folder removes the tags you added to that folder.
• The preview on the right shows the kind, page count, modification date and the document's outline. The section that matches your search opens automatically; similar files and tags are at the bottom.
• In the main window: click a result to preview it on the right; double-click it, click Open in the preview or press ↵ to open it (the timeline and Recently Opened work the same way); ⌘ ↵ shows in Finder, ⌘ Y opens Quick Look, → moves into the preview and ← goes back to the list.
• In a narrow window only the list is shown, with Open / Show in Finder / Preview at the bottom; ⌘ Y or → opens the preview over the list, and ← or Esc goes back.
• With the Enhanced model, search works across languages: ask in English about a Chinese document, or the other way round. With the Standard model, search works best in the language the document is written in.

Other pages

• Timeline: files created or changed recently, grouped by day. Choose today, 7, 30 or 90 days, filter by kind and by "created / modified", and press ⌘ F to filter by name.
• Status:
  • whether the background service is running, how many files and bookmarks are indexed, which semantic model is in use, and the resource mode;
  • three-stage progress (names → content → meaning) for each folder and bookmark file;
  • dead and duplicate bookmarks, each of which you can expand to see every entry;
  • You can Pause indexing at any time and Resume Now when you're ready. When indexing slows down (for example on battery), the page says why.
• Folders: what Memtrove indexes — your entire home folder, or selected top-level folders, plus other locations such as external drives. The right side lists places that are always skipped. Click Save and Restart Service to apply changes; what's already indexed is kept.

Closing the main window with the red button keeps Memtrove running; click its Dock icon to bring the window back, on the page and search you left. Press ⌘ Q to quit.

Settings

Press ⌘ , or click the gear in the top-right corner to open the Settings window (when the main window is full screen, Settings opens as a page inside it; click another tab to go back). It has six sections:

• License: trial days left, activate with your key, deactivate on this Mac.
• General: open at login, interface language, resource usage (Fast / Balanced / Eco).
• Semantic Model: Standard or Enhanced, with download and rebuild progress.
• Connect Claude: connect Claude Desktop, and the command for Claude Code.
• Privacy: sensitive folders, what Claude can see in them, and fetching bookmarked pages.
• Updates: the current version and Check for Updates.

Changes are saved automatically.

Semantic model

• Standard (default): about 130 MB and indexes quickly. Searching across languages doesn't work well.
• Enhanced: the best results, including searching across Chinese and English. About 600 MB, and indexing is several times slower.

When you choose Enhanced in Settings › Semantic Model, Memtrove explains what will happen and waits for you to confirm. It then downloads the model and rebuilds the semantic index in the background — you can follow the progress there and on the Status page. Until the rebuild finishes, search keeps using the current model.

The Enhanced model uses about 1.6 GB of memory while indexing (released after 5 minutes of inactivity). On Macs with 8 GB of memory, Memtrove suggests staying with Standard.

Sensitive folders

In Settings › Privacy, add folders that hold contracts, medical records and the like as sensitive folders. Sensitive folders only limit Claude — you can still search and preview them in Memtrove yourself. You choose what Claude can see:

• Structure only: folders, file names and section headings — no text or previews;
• Nothing: these folders never appear in Claude's results. Memtrove doesn't read their contents either, so you can only find these files by name.

Places like ~/.ssh are always protected.

Using Memtrove with Claude

Connecting is optional.

• Claude Desktop: quit Claude Desktop (⌘Q), click Connect in Settings › Connect Claude, then open Claude Desktop again. Then just ask Claude — for example, "Find last month's contract with Acme and summarize the payment terms."
• Claude Code: copy the claude mcp … memtrove … command from the same page and run it once in Terminal; it replaces any older Memtrove entry and works in every project.

Through Memtrove, Claude can search, read (outline first, then individual sections as needed), find similar files, check the timeline and status, and tag files. Results include file sizes, and Claude can list your largest files, show which folders take the most space, and find duplicate files with the space they waste — ask, for example, "What's taking up space in Downloads?". Everything is read-only: Memtrove never changes or deletes your files; Claude only tells you what to clean up, and you delete or move files yourself.

Sizes come from the index: folders that are excluded from indexing (such as node_modules) aren't counted, and duplicates only cover files whose content has been indexed.

Note: whatever Claude reads is sent to Anthropic for processing, under Claude's terms. For folders you don't want Claude to see, mark them sensitive with Nothing, or remove them from the indexed folders.

Open at login

With Settings › General › Open at login on, the indexing service runs in the background after you log in, so new files are indexed as they appear. The first time, macOS may ask you to allow Memtrove under System Settings › General › Login Items; Settings shows a note and an Open System Settings button. When it's off, the service only runs while Memtrove or Claude is using it.

License and trial

• All features are available for 14 days after installing.
• A license is a one-time purchase for up to 3 of your Macs, and includes every update to its major version (for example 1.x). The next major version (for example 2.0) needs a license upgrade; if you skip it, the versions you have keep working.
• When the trial has ended and there's no license, the index is still kept up to date, but search only matches file names and bookmark titles. Content and semantic search, the preview and Claude are paused, and come back as soon as you activate a license.
• Enter the key from your purchase email in Settings › License and click Activate. Activation needs an internet connection once; after that, Memtrove works offline.
• Moving to a new Mac: click Deactivate… on the old one, then activate on the new one.

Updates

Go to Settings › Updates › Check for Updates. If a new version is a major version your license doesn't include, Memtrove tells you before installing it. You can always keep using the version you have.

Resource usage

• The first index of your whole home folder takes a while: tens to hundreds of thousands of files, from a few minutes to an hour or two. After that, only changed files are processed.
• Resource usage can be:
  • Fast: uses every core all the time;
  • Balanced: slows down while you use your Mac, full speed when idle;
  • Eco: half the cores when idle, and no semantic indexing on battery.
• The background service uses about 80 MB of memory when idle, and about 500 MB while the semantic model is loaded. The model is released after 5 minutes of inactivity.

Uninstall

1. Turn off Open at login in Settings › General. If you connected Claude, remove the memtrove entry from Claude Desktop's configuration.
2. Quit Memtrove and move it from Applications to the Trash.
3. To delete its data as well (index, settings, logs, license state), remove ~/Library/Application Support/Memtrove and ~/Library/Application Support/app.memtrove.desktop.

Troubleshooting

A file doesn't show up? On the Status page, check that its folder is indexed and fully processed, and make sure Memtrove has Full Disk Access. By default Memtrove skips:

• hidden folders at the top of your home folder;
• dependency folders such as node_modules;
• build output and tool environments inside projects, such as .build, .conda, or dist next to a package.json;
• system files such as .DS_Store, and minified scripts;
• .env files and private keys;
• very large files.

macOS keeps asking "Memtrove would like to access…"? Turning on Full Disk Access fixes this once and for all.

The indexing service isn't running? The main window shows "The background indexing service isn't running"; click Start Service. If it keeps stopping, click View Logs and send the log to support@memtrove.app.

The semantic model download failed? Check your connection and retry in Settings › Semantic Model. Downloads resume where they left off, and the files are verified.