MyBook — Getting started

MyBook is a local-first personal notebook built around one page per day: the day's entries, its plans and its review all live on the same page. There is no account, no cloud and no built-in LLM — everything stays on your own computer, under ~/.mybook.

Install

Get MyBook from the download page — on Windows, run the .exe installer. The link always points at the latest build.
Launch it. MyBook starts a local server on 127.0.0.1:8799 and opens the desktop window; you can open that same address in a browser too.

Write the first page

The Today page leads with the date, then a time spine that threads the day together.

The quick capture box takes anything: a sentence, a photo, a voice note, a video, or a file you drop on it. Press Ctrl+Enter and it appears on the timeline.

For something longer, create an entry under Journal — rich text editing, tags, a mood (expressed as weather), pinning and archiving, saving as you type. It is stored as Markdown underneath, and you can switch to the source at any time.

Keep plans on the same day

The Plans page offers five views: Today, Upcoming, Inbox, All and a board. When adding a plan, one line of shorthand sets everything:

Write the weekly report !high @tomorrow #work ~weekly

!high priority (!med and !low too)
@tomorrow due date (@2026-10-01 works as well)
#work a tag
~weekly a repeat rule (~daily, ~monthly likewise)

Whatever you did not finish yesterday moves over with "roll over unfinished" on the Today page.

Close the day with a review

The Review page asks for the day: mood, energy, a score, then highlights, challenges, what you learned and what you are grateful for. It ends with three things for tomorrow — save, and they become tomorrow's plans.

Once a week there is a weekly review as well: a seven-day overview plus a summary, what went well, what to improve and next week's focus.

Bring any day back

Calendar — every day on the month view carries its mood, entry count, plan completion and whether it was reviewed. The Chinese edition also shows lunar dates, the 24 solar terms, traditional and public holidays, and workday/holiday markers. Click a day to preview it, double-click to open it.
Insights — current streak, active days, review rate, plan completion, a mood curve, when during the day you write, and a heatmap of the past year.
Search — Ctrl+K or / from anywhere, full-text across entries, plans and reviews, with highlighted snippets and filters for type, date and tag.

Your data

Everything lives in ~/.mybook: JSON files plus the original photos, audio and video.

Export JSON — the complete data, re-importable into MyBook.
Export Markdown — one .md per day with media copied alongside, readable in any editor.
Daily backup — a snapshot is written into backups every day, and you can take one by hand whenever you like.

On launch MyBook anonymously reports its version and system information (a random install id) so we know how many people use it. Nothing you write is ever included, and you can switch it off under Settings → About.

Let an agent write with you

MyBook ships an MCP server. With the app running:

claude mcp add --transport http mybook http://127.0.0.1:8799/mcp

Once connected, agents such as Claude Code or Cursor can write your diary, add plans, run the review and search past days — 25 tools covering entries, plans, reviews, looking back and exporting. On connect, MyBook sends a short workflow: read the day before writing to it, use the user's own words, confirm before deleting anything.

Settings → Agent access has the full commands ready to copy, and mybook agent prints them too.

Command line (when running from source)

If you run MyBook from the repository, it also ships a thin CLI (it only calls the local HTTP API; it never touches the data directly). With the app running:

mybook status
mybook add "an idea I just had"
mybook task "Write the weekly report !high @tomorrow #work"
mybook today
mybook export "D:\MyBook Export"