Let Claude read, search, and write your notes directly

Asking an AI assistant about your notes usually means finding the right file, opening it, copying the text, pasting it into a chat window, and repeating that for every note that might be relevant. inkwell skips all of it: Claude can read, search, and write to your vault directly, because inkwell speaks MCP.

What's actually running

inkwell ships a native inkwell-mcp binary, written in Rust and bundled inside the app. It communicates with Claude Desktop — or any MCP-compatible client — over stdio using JSON-RPC 2.0. There's no server to host, no API key to manage, and no network request leaving your machine. It reads the active vault path from ~/.inkwell/active-vault, which inkwell writes automatically whenever you open a vault, so Claude always knows which folder you're working in.

Six tools, each doing one specific thing

The MCP server exposes a small, deliberate set of tools rather than a single do-everything endpoint:

• list_notes — returns every note in the vault with its title, path, tags, and timestamps.
• read_note — returns the full content of a note by ID or path, frontmatter stripped.
• create_note — creates a new note with a title and content, adding YAML frontmatter automatically.
• update_note — overwrites the content of an existing note by ID.
• search_notes — full-text search across the vault, returning matches with a relevance score.
• get_vault_info — returns vault metadata: path, note count, folder structure, and active theme.

That combination is enough for Claude to answer questions grounded in your actual notes, draft a new note based on something you're discussing, or find every note that mentions a topic — all without you ever pasting a single line of text.

Three-minute setup

1. Build the MCP server binary, or use the one already bundled in the app:

cd src-tauri && cargo build --release -p inkwell-mcp

2. Add it to your Claude Desktop config at ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "inkwell": {
      "command": "/Applications/inkwell.app/Contents/MacOS/inkwell-mcp"
    }
  }
}

3. Restart Claude Desktop, open a vault in inkwell, and Claude has access to your notes.

Why local matters here specifically

This isn't inkwell sending your notes to a cloud service that then talks to Claude on your behalf — the MCP server runs on your machine and talks to your locally-configured Claude client directly over stdio. Your notes only leave your filesystem the moment you, using a client you configured, ask Claude to read them. That's a meaningfully different privacy posture than pasting sensitive notes into a browser tab.

Full setup instructions and the complete tool reference are in the Claude MCP docs.