hushvault

The second brain you share with your AI. Notes, PDFs, Word documents and images live together in one plain folder on your computer — searchable, linkable, taggable — and nothing ever leaves your device. When you want AI help, you connect your own assistant: it reads your library right here, on your machine.

hushvault is the desktop sibling of hushpdf, built on the same promise: your files stay yours. Where hushpdf converts a single PDF in your browser without an upload, hushvault is a whole workspace for the notes and documents you keep — a desktop app that never phones home. That's a commitment, not a tagline — read the promises it's built on.

Download for macOS Download for Windows

Pay what you want, including free. Universal macOS build (Apple Silicon and Intel) and a Windows x64/ARM64 build. The macOS build is signed and notarized by Apple, so it opens with a normal double-click.

Windows: this beta isn't signed yet, so SmartScreen will warn on first launch — click More info → Run anyway, once, and it opens normally after that.

New in 0.9.6 (August 2026): e-books — .epub files open as chapters in the app's own typography and every chapter is searchable like the rest of your library; Kindle-format files are listed honestly, and your library re-reads itself once after updating. Just before it, 0.9.5 made every save all-or-nothing — an important fix for libraries on network shares. Full release notes →

One search box over notes, plain text, and document text. Narrow it with tag:, kind: and in: filters — the chips show how your query was read — then save it to the sidebar to re-run later.

One search — for you, and for your AI

Everything in the vault answers a single search box: your notes, plain text files, Word documents, and PDFs — including scanned ones, which hushvault reads on your own machine, so even a photographed contract becomes findable. Accents are optional: searching prestacao finds prestação. Narrow with tag:, kind: and in:, and save the searches you use often to the sidebar.

The same library is open to your AI — if you choose. Connect your AI, in the vault menu, gives Claude Code, Claude Desktop, or any MCP-compatible assistant a read-only view of your library: it can search and read everything hushvault has indexed, right on your machine. hushvault itself still makes no network calls — your assistant gets a library card, not a pen. You set the connection up in the assistant, and you can remove it the same way.

What it does

Read and edit Markdown with live preview, code highlighting, and Mermaid diagrams — and if Markdown is new to you, everything you need fits on one page.
View PDFs and images in the same tabbed workspace as your notes — select and copy text straight off the PDF page, highlight passages that survive restarts and renames, and zoom with ⌘+ or a trackpad pinch.
Read e-books too — .epub files open as chapters in the app's typography, searchable like everything else; Kindle-format files are listed honestly rather than vanishing.
Keep Word documents in the library too — .docx files open as page-shaped previews, indexed and searchable like everything else; editing stays in Word, one click away, and when a same-named PDF sits beside the document, hushvault offers you the exact one. Older .doc files are listed too, so nothing in your folder is invisible.
Connect your AI — Claude Code, Claude Desktop, or any MCP-compatible assistant gets a read-only view of the library, on your machine, set up with one copied command.
Keep the vault on an office network drive — hushvault re-checks it when you come back, and deleting asks before removing permanently where the server has no Recycle Bin.
Reorganize without fear — rename or move a note, a document, a whole folder, or a Finder-style multi-selection, and every link pointing at them is updated for you. Batch-tag or Trash the same selection in one step.
Run a full PDF toolbench on whole folders at once — merge, split, rotate, organize pages, compress, password-protect, stamp page numbers or watermarks, and extract text straight into Markdown notes.
Search everything at once — notes, plain-text files, and document text, including text recognized from scanned PDFs and images — narrow with tag:, kind: and in: filters, and save a search to the sidebar.
Link notes with [[wikilinks]] (even to a specific PDF page), tag anything with autocomplete, and see what links back.
Capture without ceremony — paste a screenshot straight into a note, drop files into a watched inbox/ folder, and let the duplicate finder keep the library clean.
Write in a focus mode that fades everything but the paragraph you're on, keeps your typing centered, and counts your words as you go.
Make reading comfortable — light and dark, five colour palettes (including an LCD green), a serif or mono reading face, a warm or dim tint for PDF pages, and ⌘+ / ⌘− text zoom.
Work in split view — two notes side by side — start the day with a one-key journal note, and export any note to HTML or PDF.
Use it in English or Portuguese — it follows your system language, and you can switch whenever you like.

Coming from DEVONthink? Read the honest comparison — or, on Windows, why hushvault fits where DEVONthink can't go.

Select text in a PDF and press ⌘⇧H. Highlights are stored in a small JSON file next to the PDF, so they survive restarts, zoom, renames and moves — and a rail of ticks in the corner expands to list them.

How it works

No accounts, no import step, no lock-in. Open hushvault and choose any folder on your computer — that becomes your vault. It can be empty, or full of markdown notes and PDFs you already have. hushvault never moves, renames, or copies your files; it reads them where they are.

In the background it scans the vault and builds a local search index — including text recognized from scanned PDFs and images, so even a photographed document becomes searchable. That index lives outside your vault folder and is entirely disposable: delete it and hushvault rebuilds it from your files. Your files are always the source of truth.

From there you write, read, and link: markdown with live preview, PDFs and images alongside your notes, [[wikilinks]] between them — even to a specific PDF page — and one search that jumps to anything.

Because the vault is a plain folder, reorganizing is safe: select several files, move them into a new folder, and every wikilink pointing at them is updated for you. Files already at the destination are skipped, never overwritten.

Why "local-first" matters

Your vault is just a folder of ordinary .md, .txt, .pdf, and image files on your own disk. hushvault makes no network calls, has no accounts, and collects no telemetry — the text recognition that makes scanned documents searchable runs entirely on your machine. Nothing you write is ever locked inside the app, nothing ever travels to a server, and the app works exactly the same with your network off.

Beta

hushvault is in active beta. Expect rough edges, and keep backups of anything important — though since your vault is just a folder of files, your work is never trapped. It's offered pay-what-you-want, including free; if it earns a place in your day, a tip keeps the lights on.