Gather Capture

A native macOS menu bar app combining minimal notes with Gather's source library.

The default workspace is ~/Documents/GatherCapture. The sidebar presents a workflow-oriented view while keeping the underlying Markdown layout simple:

• notes/ stores the current note plus finalized note files.
• gather/ stores text capture records, clipboard image records and assets in images/, and hidden text summaries.
• topics.md stores topics for notes and text captures.
• output/ stores syntheses and other derived work directly.
• AGENTS.md at the workspace root contains the combined notes and Gather instructions.

Build & run

./Scripts/make_app.sh release
open ./GatherCapture.app

For development:

swift run GatherCapture

Notes

Notes is deliberately minimal and runs in its own window. The current note autosaves to notes/now.md. Use the editor context menu to create a new note; this writes the current note to a timestamped Markdown file in notes/ with record frontmatter and clears the editor.

Gather

Gather is workflow-first. The current note remains exclusively in the Notes window. Every new text capture is processed automatically in the background: Codex generates brief, concise, detailed, and comprehensive summaries in one pass and assigns one existing topic or creates a new topic.

Clipboard images are kept separate. Codex gives each image one informative name; images do not receive summaries or topics. In the Gather window, the Recent / Topics / Images selector switches to a newest-first image library: the sidebar lists image titles and the content area shows a masonry gallery. Double-click an image for a full-window preview; press Escape or click × to close it.

The Recent / Topics modes show the text library either newest-first or in named virtual topic folders. Captures still being processed remain accessible in Recent and appear under their topic once processing finishes. Captures open at the shortest summary by default; the footer slider moves through all four editable variants up to the original. Summary generation uses GPT-5.6-Terra with medium reasoning and is allowed to finish without an app-side timeout. Reorganize regenerates every variant and re-evaluates the topic using the current prompt. Existing uncategorized captures can be categorized manually in Settings, which can also reprocess the whole library after changing the prompt. Output exposes derived files such as syntheses without showing internal storage. The floating Agent button launches the configured command for the workspace. By default, Agent opens the workspace in ChatGPT.

Hotkeys

Hotkey	Action
Option-Space	Toggle the Notes window
Option-Shift-Space	Toggle the Gather window
Command-G	Gather clipboard URL/text/image into gather/

Architecture

The target keeps vertical slices copied from the source apps where useful:

Slice	Files
App shell	Sources/GatherCapture/App/
Notes	Sources/GatherCapture/Notes/
Gather extraction/library	Sources/GatherCapture/Gather/
Settings/support	Sources/GatherCapture/Settings/, Sources/GatherCapture/Support/

Tests

swift test