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Frictionless

By @harshithn

  • 5 Devlogs
  • 10 Total hours

recall — a local full-text search tool for macOS. One hotkey searches your clipboard, browser history, Notes, shell, mail, and chat apps all at once. No cloud, no account, everything stays on your machine.
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@harshithn on Frictionless

4h 13m 23s logged

  • URL search results show the real page title now, not the raw link
  • Before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12345
  • After: Show HN: I built X – Hacker News
  • Cached locally so URLs only get fetched once
  • New recall titles command to backfill the whole index
  • No new dependencies
@harshithn
  • URL search results show the real page title now, not the raw link
  • Before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12345
  • After: Show HN: I built X – Hacker News
  • Cached locally so URLs only get fetched once
  • New recall titles command to backfill the whole index
  • No new dependencies

Replying to @harshithn
0
11
Open comments for this post

@harshithn on Frictionless

3h 12m 29s logged

  • Fixed silent failure on Apple Notes (and Mail) indexing
  • Root cause: macOS Full Disk Access not granted to the user’s terminal
  • New recall setup command — click-by-step walkthrough
    • Detects your terminal (Terminal, iTerm, Warp, VS Code)
    • Opens the right System Settings pane
    • Reminds you to quit+reopen the terminal (the #1 gotcha)
  • recall doctor now points to recall setup instead of just saying
    “Full Disk Access required”
  • Apple Notes indexer now logs a clear permission warning instead of
    failing silently
  • README gets a new “macOS permissions (one-time, ~30 seconds)” section
  • Triggered by reviewer feedback: “I couldn’t get indexing notes to work”
@harshithn
  • Fixed silent failure on Apple Notes (and Mail) indexing
  • Root cause: macOS Full Disk Access not granted to the user’s terminal
  • New recall setup command — click-by-step walkthrough
    • Detects your terminal (Terminal, iTerm, Warp, VS Code)
    • Opens the right System Settings pane
    • Reminds you to quit+reopen the terminal (the #1 gotcha)
  • recall doctor now points to recall setup instead of just saying
    “Full Disk Access required”
  • Apple Notes indexer now logs a clear permission warning instead of
    failing silently
  • README gets a new “macOS permissions (one-time, ~30 seconds)” section
  • Triggered by reviewer feedback: “I couldn’t get indexing notes to work”

Replying to @harshithn
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Ship #1 Pending review

@harshithn on Frictionless

I built recall, a local full-text search tool for macOS. It indexes
your clipboard, browser history, Apple Notes, shell history, mail,
Slack, and Discord into a single SQLite FTS5 database, then lets
you search all of it with one CLI command or a small web UI.

The problem: I kept losing 5 minutes bouncing between Slack search,
Gmail search, browser history, and Notes whenever I tried to find
something I knew I'd seen. recall kills that — one box, sub-second
results, 100% local. No cloud, no account, no telemetry.

What was challenging:
- macOS permissions (Apple Notes + Mail need Full Disk Access and
fail silently without it). I added a `recall doctor` command
that surfaces these failures with actionable hints.
- Thread-safety in SQLite when the HTTP server and indexer share
a connection.
- The vanilla-JS web UI had to feel snappy without a framework —
no React, no build step, just debounced fetch + DOM.

What I'm proud of: the whole thing is ~2,500 lines of Python plus
a 200-line vanilla-JS web UI. Zero external runtime dependencies.
Anyone can read the whole thing in an hour and trust it with their
data because the data never leaves the machine.

To try it: git clone https://github.com/hnelabhotla-boop/Recall,
run ./install.sh, then `recall ui` to open the search box.

Try project → See source code →
Open comments for this post

@harshithn on Frictionless

53m 17s logged

  • New recall doctor subcommand that runs a full setup check
  • Verifies Python, SQLite FTS5, pbpaste, osascript, index DB
  • Checks every data source — clipboard, browsers, notes, mail, chat
  • Surfaces permission-gated failures (e.g. Apple Notes needs Full Disk Access)
  • Found 7 issues on my own machine that the indexer was silently skipping
  • Use it whenever something feels off: recall doctor
@harshithn
  • New recall doctor subcommand that runs a full setup check
  • Verifies Python, SQLite FTS5, pbpaste, osascript, index DB
  • Checks every data source — clipboard, browsers, notes, mail, chat
  • Surfaces permission-gated failures (e.g. Apple Notes needs Full Disk Access)
  • Found 7 issues on my own machine that the indexer was silently skipping
  • Use it whenever something feels off: recall doctor

Replying to @harshithn
0
4
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@harshithn on Frictionless

1h 48m 18s logged

Built recall, a local full-text search tool for macOS. One hotkey
searches your clipboard, browser history, Notes, shell, mail, and
chat apps at once. No cloud, no account everything stays on your
Sub-2-second searches across 1,600+ items on first run.

@harshithn

Built recall, a local full-text search tool for macOS. One hotkey
searches your clipboard, browser history, Notes, shell, mail, and
chat apps at once. No cloud, no account everything stays on your
Sub-2-second searches across 1,600+ items on first run.

Replying to @harshithn
1
4

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