Most note apps are a place you put things. With an embedding model and a chat model installed (see Local AI), MojoPad also reads back over what you've written — on your Mac — and surfaces the things you'd never think to go looking for: the note you forgot, the place two of your own notes disagree, the moment your mind changed. Everything here is a suggestion you curate, never an automatic edit, and each lives as a palette tab (see Palettes) you can drag into whatever order you like. The model can misjudge — treat these as prompts for your thinking, not verdicts.
The Rediscover tab brings back notes you haven't touched in a while that relate to what you've been writing lately. It ranks them by two signals at once: how forgotten a note is — its true place on your forgetting curve, where reading a page counts as touching it, not just editing — and how relevant it is to what you've been writing and reading recently. So what surfaces is an old note that bears on what's on your mind now, not a random one. Each card explains itself in a line ("you've been writing about onboarding; you worked this out last year"), and ✦ Why now asks the model for a sharper, specific reason. For each one you can open it, Connect it to the page you're on (drawing a real link), or Dismiss it so it never resurfaces again.
Rediscover needs a little history — notes return once they've gone a couple of weeks untouched and something you've written since relates to them.
Rediscover fights forgetting what you have. Its sibling in the Journal fights never capturing what you almost found: once a day, the ✦ Beyond your notes card reads your recent themes and pitches a few ideas that are squarely inside your territory but missing from your wiki — each one checked against the meaning index first, so it never pitches something you already keep a page on. Click a pitch to explore it in an Ask conversation; dismiss the ones that miss. Pitches wait until you deal with them. The full story lives in The Journal chapter, and the switch lives in Settings ▸ AI.
Backlinks and Related surface similarity. Insight more often comes from tension — the thing you believe that an older note of yours disputes. The Provocations tab reads the notes that relate by meaning and asks your local model where two of them genuinely contradict each other, then states the disagreement in a sentence. Click ✦ Find a provocation and it checks the pairs touching your most recent writing first. This is deliberately rare — most notes simply agree — so it tells you when it checked and found none, and Find more digs deeper. Each provocation links to both notes, so you can reconcile them, supersede one, or keep both.
The tab above is something you go to. The same reading can also arrive on its own. Turn on Look for places my own notes disagree in Settings ▸ Journal, and once a day MojoPad weighs a few of your related notes against each other while you write. Anything it finds is waiting at the top of today in the Journal, under ✦ Where your notes disagree: the two notes, a sentence naming the argument between them, and a line saying why they were put together at all. Open either one, or wave the pair off as settled and it will not come back.
Why this is worth having your Mac do. Because the model runs on your own machine, a thought costs nothing but the machine. An assistant billed by the question can only afford to look where you point it. Yours can afford to weigh pairs of your notes against each other on the chance that two of them turn out to disagree, and throw away the ones that don't — which is most of them.
What it will not do matters as much as what it will:
The card above looks once, when you open the Journal. Turn on Keep looking while I'm away from the keyboard in Settings ▸ Journal and it carries on afterwards, working through pairs of your related notes while you are somewhere else.
Why this is worth a machine's time. Because your AI runs here, a thought costs electricity rather than a fee. That changes what is worth doing. Anything that charges by the question can only afford to look where you point it — so it will never go through a hundred pairs of your notes on the chance that three of them turn out to argue. Yours can, and can throw away the ninety-seven that don't, which is the only way that particular find ever surfaces.
What it will not do is the real specification:
What it has cost — how many pairs it has weighed and how many minutes of thinking that came to — is in Help ▸ Diagnostics, along with what it is waiting for if it is not running. Turning the switch off stops it mid-thought rather than at the end of one.
MojoPad timestamps every page and keeps a version history, so a local model can tell you not just what you wrote but how your thinking has moved.
The Bisect tab answers "when did I change my mind about this?" Type a belief —
"cold showers are worth it" — and MojoPad gathers the notes about it, lines them up oldest
to newest, and binary-searches the model's read of each one to pinpoint the note where your
view turned. Like git bisect for your own thinking: it reads only a handful of
notes to find the pivot, and shows you the turn and the note just before it.
Open a page's history (its menu ▸ Page Versions…; see Recently Deleted and Backups), pick an earlier snapshot, and click ✦ How my thinking changed. Instead of a line-by-line text diff, the model reports what shifted in meaning — a claim added, dropped, reversed, softened, or strengthened — ignoring pure rewording.
The Shifts tab is a deliberate record of changing your mind. Press ✎ Record a belief change, jot what you used to think and what you think now (and optionally why), and it joins an "I used to think X, now Y" timeline — each entry stamped with the date and the page you were on. Select the old wording in a page first and it's filled in for you.
The Lint tab is a "problems panel" for meaning, not spelling — like the warnings panel in a code editor, but for your ideas. Press 🔍 Check this page and your local model flags:
Every finding is a suggestion you act on or ignore — MojoPad never edits the page for you.
Like the rest of MojoPad's AI, everything here runs against Ollama on 127.0.0.1;
encrypted pages are excluded; and if no model is running, each tab explains what to install while
the rest of the app carries on. See Local AI for setup.