Squirrel Squirrel for attention-hyperactive minds
Local-first · Attention-hyperactive

Your brain jumps. Squirrel keeps the trail.

A calm, local-first focus companion for attention that scatters — capture the noise, break the overwhelm into chunks, and pick up exactly where you left off after every distraction. It's durable working memory, so no context is lost and no thought is stranded on the wrong machine.

Download for Mac
See how it works

Private by design

No cloud, no account — it never leaves your laptop.

Plain Markdown vault

Just files you can read, grep, and back up.

Works with your agent

Lives in your menu bar and terminal — and inside Claude, Codex, Cursor, Copilot & Windsurf.

captured ✓filed to @home
chunk 2 / 5~20 min · doable

TODAY · SUN, MAY 31

Your focus is set.

Pasaportes vigentes

VISA-FAMILIA · today

AM

Declaración impuestos 2025

pressing · 45d overdue

due

The attention tax

Most task apps assume you'll remember to come back.

Squirrel is built for the way attention actually behaves — it does the remembering so you don't have to. It's durable working memory for minds that jump between projects: no context lost, no decision forgotten, no deadline silently slipped, no thought trapped on the wrong machine.

"Wait, where was I?"

One ping and the whole mental stack is gone. Rebuilding it costs 20 minutes you didn't have.

The task won't start

It's too big to look at. So it sits, and it stares, and the guilt grows louder than the task.

Ideas everywhere

Sticky notes, three apps, the back of a receipt. Capture is easy — finding it again is not.

Deadlines ambush you

"Due Friday" feels infinitely far away — right up until it's Friday at 4pm.

What it does

A companion that catches what you drop.

Squirrel doesn't nag you to be more disciplined. It handles the remembering, the chunking, and the context-rebuilding so your attention is free for the work.

Pick up the trail

Pulled away? One command reloads your last session — what you were doing, why, and the exact next step — so re-entry takes seconds.

/sq-start

Capture the scatter

Brain-dump a thought the instant it appears, mid-task, without losing focus. It lands in the right pile automatically.

/sq-capture

Chunk the overwhelm

Hand Squirrel a task that feels impossible. It splits it into 20-minute pieces and hands you the very first one.

/sq-chunk

Guard the hyperfocus

When you finally lock in, Squirrel protects the flow — and nudges you toward breaks before the day disappears.

hyperfocus-guardian

Deadlines that surface

Due dates rise to the top before they bite. Squirrel reads the urgency and tells you what genuinely can't wait.

/sq-deadlines

Instant briefs

Need to tell a lead where things stand? Get a clean six-section brief of every project in seconds.

/sq-brief

Check in with your mind

Every few hours the Mind Journal asks what you're thinking and what you're doing — a one-tap mood log that externalizes the swirl before it runs the day.

mind-journal

The loop

Three moves. That's the whole system.

No elaborate methodology to abandon by Tuesday. Just a rhythm loose enough to actually keep.

01

Dump it

Whatever's rattling around — a task, a worry, a half-idea — throw it at Squirrel and keep moving.

› /sq-capture
# "email the landlord re: lease"
→ filed under @home ✓
02

Break it down

When something feels too heavy to start, ask Squirrel to slice it into a first step you can't say no to.

› /sq-chunk "quarterly report"
# 5 chunks · ~20 min each
→ start: open last quarter's doc
03

Re-enter

Distracted? Tomorrow? Next week? One command rebuilds the full picture and points you at the next thing.

› /sq-start report
# last touched 2 days ago
→ you're on chunk 3 of 5

The payoff

Less in your head. More peace of mind.

The point isn't more productivity — it's a quieter mind. When the remembering happens somewhere safe, the stress, the clutter, and the low-grade dread have somewhere to go.

Stress, offloaded

Your head stops being the only place your work lives. Captures, chunks, and decisions are held for you — so you can put something down without the fear of losing it.

Order, by default

One vault instead of sticky notes, three apps, and the back of a receipt. Projects, notes, and deadlines land in the right place on their own — clutter never piles up.

Anxiety, quieted

Nothing slips silently. Deadlines surface before they bite and the Mind Journal checks in every few hours — so the "what am I forgetting?" dread has nowhere left to grow.

Yours, actually

No cloud. No account.
No watching you.

Squirrel is a vault of plain Markdown files on your own machine. It runs offline — there's no server holding your half-formed thoughts hostage, and nothing to subscribe to. Deterministic work runs in local scripts, so your agent only handles judgment — a typical session costs a fraction of the tokens.

  • Plain Markdown vault. Read it, grep it, back it up, version it with Git, or open it in Obsidian. It's just files.

  • Runs on localhost. The backend serves only 127.0.0.1 — nothing leaves your laptop.

  • Lives in your menu bar. A native macOS popup, plus a CLI, a local web UI, and skills inside your AI agents.

  • Air-gap by design. Move context between worlds with hash-verified packages you paste — the human is the bridge, never a sync robot.

~/squirrel-vaultplain text 
📁 projects/
  📁 migration/
    📄 intent.md
    📄 chunks.md
    📄 decisions.md
📁 captures/
  📄 inbox.md
📁 sessions/
  📄 2026-05-31-shutdown.md
config.toml
Free · Open · Local

Stop losing the thread.

Install Squirrel, point it at a folder, and tell your agent /sq-status. That's the whole setup.

Download for Mac .dmg View on GitHub

macOS · unsigned beta — right-click → Open on first launch

Palette