MojoPad can hand an AI assistant a set of tools for working with your wikis — so instead of you clicking around, you can just ask. Say “make a MojoPad wiki from the documents in this folder” and the assistant builds it; ask “what do my notes say about onboarding?” and it answers from your pages. As with everything in MojoPad, it all happens on your Mac; nothing about your wikis leaves your computer.
If words like MCP and agent are new to you, this chapter starts from zero. You don't need to be technical to use any of it.
MCP (the Model Context Protocol) is simply a shared standard for letting an AI assistant use tools. On its own, a chat assistant can only talk. MCP is the socket that lets it also do things in real apps — read a file, search a database, create a document. A program that offers such tools is called an MCP server; the assistant that uses them is the MCP client (or agent).
MojoPad includes an MCP server. Turning it on gives your assistant eleven MojoPad tools — create a wiki, add a page, search, ask a question, and so on. You never see the tools directly; you just talk to your assistant in plain language, and behind the scenes it picks the right MojoPad tool for what you asked. Think of it as teaching your AI assistant how to use MojoPad on your behalf.
Open Settings ▸ AI Agents (⌘,, then the AI Agents tab). You'll see a
button for each app. Click the one you use:
After connecting, confirm it worked: ask your assistant “check the MojoPad app status” or “list the pages in <some wiki>”. If it can answer, you're connected. From here on you never touch Settings again — you just talk to your assistant.
A concrete way to feel it working, in a fresh assistant session:
/path/to/that/folder, then open it in MojoPad.”That's the whole loop: you ask, the assistant uses MojoPad's tools, the result appears in the app. No wiki opens with setup questions — it's ready to use.
The tools fall into two groups. The offline group works directly with wiki files on disk — MojoPad doesn't even need to be running:
| You can say… | What happens |
|---|---|
| “Create a wiki at <path>” | Makes a new, empty .mojopad document. |
| “Fill it from the documents in <folder>” | Imports a folder: Markdown and text become editable pages, images are embedded, and PDFs, EPUBs, and Word files come in as attachments you can open and read in MojoPad. |
| “Add a page called X with this content…” | Writes a new page into a wiki. |
| “List / read / search the pages in <wiki>” | Browses a wiki's pages, reads one, or keyword-searches it. |
| “Open <wiki> in MojoPad” | Launches the app on that wiki. |
The live group works with the wiki you have open right now, using your local AI (these need the first switch below, and Ollama running):
| You can say… | What happens |
|---|---|
| “Ask my open wiki: <question>” | Answers from your own pages, and cites which pages it drew from. |
| “Search my open wiki by meaning for <idea>” | Finds related pages by meaning, not just matching words. |
| “Add a page to my open wiki…” | Writes a page that appears in the app as it's created (needs the second switch below). |
In Settings ▸ AI Agents there are three. Each one starts at its most careful setting, and each unlocks a little more:
| Control | What it allows | Change it when… |
|---|---|---|
| Let agents reach the wiki that's open right now (off) | Unlocks the live features — Ask and search-by-meaning over your open wiki. The connection exists only on your own computer and is guarded by a private key, so a web page or another machine can't reach it. Nothing listens until you switch it on. | You want to ask questions of, or semantically search, the wiki you're working in. |
| Allow agents to modify wikis you already have (off) | With this off, an assistant can create new wikis but not change the ones you keep. On, it can also add pages to a wiki you already have, and fill an existing wiki from a folder. | You trust the assistant to write into wikis you already keep. |
| Agents may read (wikis you've opened in MojoPad) | Which wikis an assistant can look inside without your naming them. Opening a wiki in MojoPad once is what puts it on the list. The alternative, any wiki on this Mac, lets an assistant read a wiki straight off the disk. | You keep a wiki you never open in MojoPad and still want an assistant reading it — otherwise leave it be. |
A good default: change nothing to start. Making new wikis and reading the ones you actually use — the most common jobs — needs no change at all.
This one is worth understanding, because it's the difference between “my wikis” and “every wiki on this computer”, and those aren't the same thing.
An assistant reaches your wikis by path — it names a file on disk. Nothing stops it naming one you never mentioned, and earlier versions of MojoPad would simply open it. So the list of wikis you've opened in MojoPad is now the boundary: those are readable, and anything else gets a polite refusal that tells you how to change it.
Practically:
This deserves saying precisely, because the honest answer has two halves.
MojoPad's half runs entirely on your Mac. The tools read and write local files directly. Nothing is uploaded by MojoPad, no account is involved, and if you use no AI features at all, no connection is even opened. The live connection is local-only and key-guarded, so nothing outside your computer can reach your wikis through it.
The assistant's half is the assistant's. It isn't MojoPad, and when it reads a page, what it reads goes wherever that assistant sends it. If it's an assistant that thinks in the cloud, then the page does too — that's what asking it to read your wiki means. Nothing is shared until it asks and you allow it, and the three controls above are how you decide how much it can ask for.
Ask is the exception, and it's a real one. When you ask a question of your open wiki, your local AI reads your pages and composes the answer here on your Mac. Only that answer travels back. The wiki itself never leaves.
Here's the awkward thing about the rule above: the wiki you'd most like help finding something in is usually the one you haven't opened in a year — because that's precisely the one whose contents you can't remember. Requiring you to open it first is backwards.
So there's a second, narrower permission. In Settings ▸ AI Agents ▸ Wikis agents may ask, press Choose a wiki… and pick one. From then on an assistant can ask that document whether it relates to a question, and that is all it can do. Not a page. Not a sentence. Not even a page title.
What it looks like. You're working on something else entirely and you ask your assistant "do I have anything on panel replacement quotes?" It comes back with:
Home — 78/100, 6 pages match
Finances — 61/100, 2 pages match
A name, a strength, a count. You now know where to look, and you go and look yourself — or you open that wiki and ask properly. What crossed the line was two document names you already knew you had.
Why this is a separate decision from the one above. Asking really does disclose less than reading, but "less" is not "nothing" — a determined assistant could ask many narrow questions and learn something from the pattern of answers. That's a fair trade to make about one document you chose deliberately, and not one MojoPad should make on your behalf for everything on your disk. So it's per wiki, you pick each one from a file dialog, and there's a ceiling on how many of these questions can be asked in an hour.
Three things it can't do, by construction rather than by good behaviour: it can't reach a password-protected wiki (their meaning index is sealed along with everything else), it can't reach a wiki that has never been opened with your local AI running (there's no meaning index to consult, and it says so by name rather than pretending nothing matched), and it can't return text — the index it reads stores page ids and numbers, not prose.
Twelve tools are only any use if you think to ask for them. So MojoPad also puts its own moves into the assistant's prompt menu: type / in Claude and you'll find which-wiki-knows, ask-the-open-wiki, catch-me-up, file-this, wiki-from-folder and where-do-they-touch, named in plain words rather than as tool names.
Pick one and it asks for what it needs — and where that's a page, the names from the wiki you have open complete as you type, so you choose the actual page instead of describing it and hoping. They're ordinary starting points, not a mode: you can always just ask for what you want in your own words, and nothing here stops you.
MojoPad keeps a plain record of every tool an assistant ran: which tool, which wiki, and the time — never what was in your pages. If you ever wonder whether something read a wiki you didn't expect, that's where to look. Open Help ▸ Diagnostics and find the AI agents section; it lists what the controls are currently set to, followed by the most recent calls.
claude
command and couldn't find it. Make sure Claude Code is installed, then try again — or use
Copy config and add MojoPad by hand.