Quick Start

Five minutes from zero to a working vault with AI access. The only thing you'll set up by hand is the AI connection itself — everything else is provisioned for you.

1. Create your account

Go to mindwiki.io/signup and pick a username. Your username becomes part of your personal capture email: {username}@mindwiki.io.

When the account is created, MindWiki provisions a fresh vault for you with one user-facing folder: capture/. That's it. No templates, no opinionated structure, no setup wizard. Your vault grows the way you want it to.

2. Open your vault

You have two ways in, both pointed at the same vault:

  • Web app — already open at mindwiki.io/account/vault. Start writing immediately.
  • macOS app — download from mindwiki.io/download. Install, sign in with the same account, choose a folder on disk for the local copy. Edits sync both ways.

Use whichever fits the moment. The web app is great for capture and quick edits anywhere. The macOS app is the full editing surface — slash commands, properties inspector, knowledge graph, command palette, keyboard navigation, attachments.

3. Capture something

Pick one to try right now:

  • Web Quick Capture — type a thought into the capture box on your account dashboard.
  • Email — forward any email or send a new one to {username}@mindwiki.io. It lands in capture/ automatically.
  • In-app — press Cmd+N in the macOS app to create a new page anywhere in the vault.

Whatever you capture is now a real markdown file in your vault. No special format. Just write.

4. Connect your AI

Open mindwiki.io/account/connections. This is the single source of truth for hooking your AI clients to your vault.

The recommended path for Claude.ai, Claude Desktop, and ChatGPT is the remote MCP / OAuth flow. You do not paste a token. You paste one URL:

https://api.mindwiki.io/mcp

Your AI client opens a browser approval page, you sign in to MindWiki, you approve, and you're connected. After that the AI can search, read, capture, and propose changes against your vault.

For per-client steps, see:

For automations, scripts, or AI clients that do not support remote MCP, mint a personal API key at mindwiki.io/account/api-keys instead. See API Access.

5. Verify it works

Ask your AI a question that requires reading the vault. For example:

Search my MindWiki for anything I've written about onboarding. Summarize what's there.

If the AI returns content from your capture/ folder or anything else you've written, the connection is live. You're done.

What's next