Your Mac's AI memory doesn't need a screen recorder

There are two ways an app on your Mac can know what you are working on. It can record the screen — capture frames continuously and run text recognition over them — or it can ask the focused window for its text through the macOS Accessibility APIs, the same interface VoiceOver uses to read the screen to a blind user. Minne uses the second, and only the second: it never takes a screenshot, never records audio, and never requests Screen Recording permission.

An AI memory does not need to see your screen. It needs to read it — and macOS has had an interface for reading windows as text, built for screen readers, for twenty years.

What the Accessibility API actually exposes

When you grant Minne Accessibility access, it can ask the frontmost window for its structure: the text of the field you are in, the visible text around it, the window title, the page URL in a browser. Text, as text — no pixels, no fonts, no images, nothing from windows sitting in the background. Everything a draft or a capture uses comes through that one interface, and the capture's exact reach is documented.

Why the purple recording dot never appears

macOS separates the permissions. Screen Recording — what Rewind needed, what a screenshot tool needs — puts the purple indicator in your menu bar while it runs. Accessibility is a different grant, and it is the only one Minne asks for. So the recording indicator never appears because of Minne — not as a courtesy, but because the permission that triggers it was never requested. The distinction matters beyond the dot, and it is why the Rewind replacement page exists at all.

What never reaches the disk

Reading text instead of pixels makes the data small enough to handle before it is stored — something no screenshot pipeline can offer:

• Password fields are skipped whole. Anything macOS marks as a secure text field is refused before a single character is read — never read-then-scrubbed.
• Sensitive numbers are masked first. Card numbers, CVVs, IBANs and personal identity numbers are replaced with ▮▮▮ before a capture touches disk — and each pattern is checksum-validated, so an order number is not blanked by mistake.
• Whole apps can be excluded. The blacklist ships already populated with password managers and credential pages; add your bank. Private browser windows are skipped without being on any list.

When you genuinely need screen recording

Text is not everything, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. If you need to see what a window looked like, work in tools that are essentially images — design canvases, video — or want your meetings captured and transcribed, you need pixels and audio, and a recorder is the right tool. Screenpipe does continuous screen and audio capture and keeps the data on your machine; that is the honest alternative when recording is what you actually want, and the trade-off is laid out plainly.

For the rest — the threads, the decisions, the people, the things you would ask your memory about or want written into a reply — the words are enough. Minne is not alone in thinking so: Goldfish, its closest neighbour, takes the same text-not-pixels approach, and so does the open-source OpenHistory. Minne is free and open source, so "only the words" is a claim you can check against the code. More first questions are answered in the FAQ.

Free, open source, and yours to read. macOS 14 and later.