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mindfork 0.15.0 — on a Mac, in Scoop, and an animated demo

· 4 min read

mindfork 0.15.0 is out. Most of it is about getting the app onto a machine: a Mac for the first time, Scoop on Windows, and a moving picture of what the app does before anyone installs it.

On a Mac — a preview

Every release now carries a build for macOS on Apple Silicon. Homebrew installs it from the project's own tap:

brew install vshylov/tap/mindfork

The same one-line install as on Linux works on a Mac too (curl -fsSL https://github.com/vshylov/mindfork-rs/releases/latest/download/install.sh | sh). Both download with curl, so macOS has nothing to object to: the binary is signed only ad hoc, not notarized, and only a file a browser downloads is held back — the install page says how to let it through.

What makes it more than a recompile:

  • API keys can be stored. On Linux a stored key is encrypted with the machine's machine-id, which a Mac does not have; there the key is the Mac's hardware identity. Keys entered in the settings stay on that Mac, as on every other system.
  • Local models run on Metal. mindfork llama setup --backend metal fetches llama.cpp's Apple build; the managed server and the Python sandbox work as they do elsewhere.
  • The data stays out of the way. Through Homebrew your chats, notes and settings live in ~/Library/Application Support/mindfork-rs, so an upgrade or an uninstall leaves them where they are.

It is a preview because no one has used it on a Mac with a screen yet. It was built and tested on GitHub's Apple Silicon machines — the whole test suite, the interface in a real terminal, llama.cpp with Metal, the installers — but how it looks in Terminal.app, iTerm2 and Ghostty, what each one does with the keys, and Metal on a real GPU are still to be seen. If you have a Mac, a report — good or bad — in the discussions or the issues is the most useful thing you could send. Intel Macs have no build: neither the Python sandbox nor llama.cpp's Metal exists for them, and cargo install mindfork builds one.

Scoop

On Windows, Scoop installs mindfork and keeps it current:

scoop bucket add mindfork https://github.com/vshylov/scoop-bucket
scoop install mindfork/mindfork

It takes the release's own archive, its hash checked, and keeps your data in %APPDATA%; the bucket picks up each new release by itself within a few hours. Scoop runs no installer, so SmartScreen has nothing to say.

An animated demo

The home page of mindfork.io now plays a 25-second animation of a turn: a question typed, the thoughts, a note saved, a table and a flowchart streamed in, then the assistant's self-model. It is not a screen recording — every release draws it from its own interface, in a dark and a light look and in Russian, so it shows what that release looks like and cannot go out of date. The files are among the release's downloads.

Keys

  • Option or Alt moves by words — Alt+←/→, and Alt+Backspace/Delete deletes a word, as Ctrl does. On a Mac this is the natural chord, since macOS keeps Ctrl+←/→ for switching Spaces; elsewhere it is simply another way.
  • Ctrl+J breaks a line in any terminal. Shift+Enter needs a terminal that reports it, and Alt+Enter a terminal that sends Alt; macOS's Terminal.app does neither out of the box, and there the input box names Ctrl+J.
  • An Alt+letter no longer types the letter. Terminal.app sends Option+←/→ as one, and a b or an f used to land in the message.

Fixed

  • Text typed with AltGr on Windows. Windows reports AltGr as Ctrl+Alt, and every character typed with it was dropped — @ and € on a German keyboard, ą on a Polish one, ₽ on the Russian one — in the input box, the chat list's search and the password prompt. They are typed now.
  • Counts that read right at one: "lines: 1" rather than "1 lines" on the folded thoughts, and the same in the chat list, the settings and the setup check; in Russian, three messages no longer pair a number with the wrong case.
  • A file manager's own files in a chat's folder — Finder's .DS_Store — are no longer taken for files the chat had lost.

Your data

Nothing in the data's format changes, and no step runs at the start.

The full list is in the changelog; downloads are on the releases page, and cargo install mindfork builds the same version from crates.io.