Edith Second Brain MCP server

Edith Second Brain

A second brain for AI.

edithapp.ai · Download for macOS

Edith is a local, plain-Markdown knowledge base that Claude can read from and write to. Ask Claude to review your past sessions and it distils them into linked notes itself - no API key, no account, no inference of its own.

Claude session ──MCP──▶      Edith.app      ──▶  the graph lights up
                              │
                              └── vault/notes/*.md

What it does

• No API key. No account. No inference. Claude reads and writes your notes through its own session, on the plan you already pay for. Edith is the store and the canvas.
• Claude fills it for you. Ask "review my recent sessions and save anything worth keeping" and Claude reads your transcripts with listsessions / readsession, then writes the notes back with save_note.
• Serves Claude over MCP. searchbrain, readnote, listnotes, and savenote. Claude both reads from and writes to the brain mid-session.
• Shows you the retrieval. A search dims-glows what Claude considered; opening a note brightly glows what it actually used. Highlights fade over 30 seconds.
• Mini mode beside your session. Minimize Edith and it becomes a narrow panel docked to the left edge of the screen, drawing your brain and lighting up the notes Claude reaches for - the window and the panel are never up at the same time. With the window closed or minimized, the panel also opens on its own when a Claude session starts. It never takes focus, folds to a strip the width of the rail or shrinks to a small square in the corner - both just the live graph - and stays closed for the rest of a session once you close it. Turn off the automatic opening under Connection.
• Takes your own content too. Add content imports .md, .markdown, .txt, and .mdx files, or anything you paste. Files keep their existing frontmatter, so importing a Markdown vault preserves ids and links instead of duplicating notes. Import as written, or distil into concepts.
• Plain Markdown. Files on disk are the source of truth. Edit them in any editor. Delete the index and it rebuilds.

Install

Edith runs on a Mac with Apple Silicon, macOS 13 or later. You also need Claude Code, in the terminal or the VS Code extension.

Download Edith — signed and notarised by Apple, so it opens with no security warnings. Open the .dmg, drag Edith into Applications, and open it from there. Restart any Claude Code sessions that were already running.

On Windows? The Windows build lives at Edith-Windows.

Or build it yourself

Needs Node.js 22.12 or newer, and the Xcode command line tools (xcode-select --install) for the native database module:

git clone https://github.com/Rchari1/Edith-SecondBrain.git
cd Edith-SecondBrain
npm install
npm run dist

The .dmg lands in release/. A build you make yourself is not notarised, but it opens anyway, because macOS trusts what you compiled on your own machine.

What happens on first launch

Edith starts its brain server on 127.0.0.1:4319 and connects itself to Claude. There is no account and no API key: ask Claude to "review my recent sessions and save anything worth keeping" and it fills the brain itself.

Outside its own folder, Edith adds:

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.