What Mimir is

You open it and today is already there

The journal is the front door. Today's date on top, yesterday under it, then the days before.

Everything is a bullet. Enter makes a new one, Tab nests it, Shift-Tab pulls it back out, and clicking a bullet folds away whatever hangs underneath. So, a page can be an overview and the full mess at the same time.

That's the whole vocabulary. No note types, no tags, no databases, no boards, no folders. Argh.

There's no New Page button either, and no Delete button. That might come as a surprise! Instead, pages come into being by being linked to. And one left empty with nothing pointing at it quietly stops existing. This way, your knowledge space stays clean.

Today's journal, and the days before it.

Why link notes at all?

Look, a note usually belongs in more than one place.

Julia recommends a library for the Amsterdam trip you're planning in March. Where does the note go? Under Julia? Under Amsterdam? Under Libraries, or under March? Pick one and you've hidden it from the other three.

Linking is different. You write the note once and name what it's about:

Coffee with [[Julia]] — she says [[OBA Oosterdok]] is worth
an afternoon on the [[Amsterdam trip]]

Each concept is a link, and the page it opens exists because you linked to it.

A backlink is that arrow pointing the other way, and it appears automatically. Open Amsterdam trip and at the bottom is every bullet anywhere in your notes that mentions it, grouped by where it came from: the coffee with Julia, last Tuesday's flight time, the half-thought about March being too cold. It collected itself, because you named the thing while writing about it.

So a page is two things at once. What you wrote on it, and everything you've said about it elsewhere. Which means a passing thought in today's journal will be waiting on the right page when you go looking.

And if you forget the brackets, it still works. Type "Amsterdam trip" as plain words and Mimir underlines them softly, because that page already exists. Click, and that one mention becomes a link.

Finding a note again is only part of this genius.

The really useful part is what turns up beside it. Something from concept a and something from concept b, written for different reasons, land on the same screen. Eureka! A new insight and idea.

While creating this also helps. By the time you sit down to write the piece, the gathering has happened. You're editing your own past thinking rather than facing a blank page.

Nobody has a thought once and finishes it. You have it in pieces, months apart, and they need somewhere to sit until they add up. In your head they don't survive the week.

A link, the page it makes, and the backlinks that follow.

Writing, searching, and formatting

Search is one keystroke or pull down away. It searches through every bullet you have ever written.

Writing is plain text with light formatting: **bold**, *italic*, =highlight=, code, # headings, and ~secret~ to mask something before a screenshot. Type @ for dates and times. URLs link themselves.

Tasks are one word. Type todo at the start of a bullet and it becomes a marker you tap to flip to done. Because those words are links like any other, the todo page lists every open task you have.

Cmd-P, and everything you've ever written.

Embedded widgets

Put a link on a bullet of its own and a small toggle appears at the end of it. Click it and the page opens underneath as a working widget. A YouTube video playing in place, a TED talk, a Spotify track, a Miro board. Your notes nest below it as ordinary bullets, and the video keeps playing while you type them.

oEmbed is an open standard. Any site that supports it works (with some caveats). I've made a set of small ones at widgets.geff.re that turn a bullet into an hourly forecast, live train departures, or a countdown. It's actually fun.

One toggle, and the link becomes the thing.

Anything on your device can write to it

Mimir listens on its own links. A mimir:// URL is a small instruction, and anything that can open a URL can send one:

mimir://append?text=Ring the dentist          a bullet on today's journal
mimir://append?text=Ring back&page=Errands   …on the Errands page instead
mimir://open?page=Errands                     opens that page

No scripting language, no plugin API, no account to connect. Apple Shortcuts, a Siri phrase, a line in a shell script. If it can open a link, it can write into Mimir.

Which already covers most of what people want from a capture tool:

Dictate a fleeting thought, hands full, and it lands in today's journal.
Send selected text, an article, or the highlights out of a PDF to a page.
Pull the text off a photo and write it down as words.
Append the morning's workout and sleep figures before you're awake.
Put a button on your home screen that opens the page you live in.

More instructions will follow. Each one is a verb and a couple of parameters, and every tool that already speaks URLs picks it up for free.

Nothing to wait for

I have a rule when building Mimir: every interaction lands in under 200 milliseconds. It's built like that from the ground up, and not an optimisation pass at the end.

Starting up is not an event. There's no splash screen, no vault to load, no plugins initialising, while you stand there with a thought you wanted to write down.
A page opens at once. No matter how long it is and however many links point at it.
It doesn't get slower as your notes pile up.
Animations explain and never entertain. Gives a good feel, though.
Typing waits for nothing. Not for storage. Not the network.

Your notes, and nobody else's business

Your notes are a plain SQLite file on your own device. Nothing has to be running, no server has to be reachable, and one device works offline forever.

So sync is end-to-end encrypted. The app makes eight words, they derive the key on your machine, and the key never leaves it. What reaches the server is sealed, and the server has nothing to open it with.

Be warned, though: lose the words and lose your devices, and nobody can get those notes back. Not you, and not me.

What it deliberately doesn't have

No plugins, and no marketplace. Nothing to install, so nothing that messes with the app.
No themes or custom CSS. One design, made on purpose, with purpose.
No settings screen. I have grown a disdain for toggles and cogwheels.
No kanban, whiteboards, databases or spreadsheets, and no document mode. Everything is a bullet, so if you want long flowing prose this is the wrong tool.
No folders. Put your need for organisation elsewhere.
No account, and no subscription. One payment, and nothing to log into.

In short

Platforms: macOS, iPhone, iPad. Linux, Android and Windows to follow. No web version.
Price: One payment, sync included.
Sync: End-to-end encrypted. Eight words instead of an account.
Storage: One plain SQLite file, openable by any SQLite tool.
Offline: One device, indefinitely.
Speed: Every interaction under 200ms, by design.
Automation: mimir:// links, growing, from Shortcuts, the share sheet or a script.
Embeds: Any site supporting oEmbed, per link, only when you ask.
Who it's for: One person, thinking. No collaboration.

The outliner note-taking experience I needed myself.