Capture

Capture is the shortest path from a thought in your head to a note in your Library. Its purpose is to make the gap between wanting to write something down and having it written down as small as possible. Everything that lands in Capture enters your Library and the ingestion pipeline. There is no separate inbox to sort through later.

Opening Capture

From anywhere in Existential, open Capture by pressing Command N, or by clicking Capture in the left sidebar.

A small dialog opens in the center of the screen, with the cursor already inside it.

What you can put in

Capture accepts three kinds of input. These are not separate modes. They are different ways to write into the same dialog.

• Typed text. Just type. Markdown is fine. Headings, bullets, links, and fenced code blocks all work.
• Voice. Click the microphone and start speaking. The Oracle transcribes on your own machine, so nothing is uploaded. When you stop, the transcript drops into the text area, where you can edit it before saving.
• Files. Drag a file in. Markdown, plain text, PDF, and EPUB are read in full. Other formats are accepted and indexed at a metadata level.

Capture does not impose structure on you. There is no type picker, no required tags, and no project to choose at the moment of capture. The Oracle infers those later during ingestion.

What happens when you save

When you save, three things happen in order.

1. The captured content is written to a Markdown file in your Library. The filename is derived from the first heading or the first line.
2. Existential notices the new file and begins to process it.
3. The content moves through a twelve-stage pipeline, which includes format normalization, concept extraction, chunking, embedding, conviction scoring, and finally indexing so the note becomes searchable.

You will see an Activity entry, "captured a note," within a few seconds. Once the work finishes, a second entry, "added to the Library," appears. If a stage in the pipeline does not complete, the note waits there until it is picked back up. The file you just wrote is never lost.

Editing a captured note after the fact

Use the capture surface for fresh capture. To edit an existing note, find it in the Library and open it there. You can also write to the same Markdown file from your own editor, and Existential will detect the change and re-read the note. The Oracle's own writes, such as linking related concepts inside your notes, are filtered out of this re-reading path, so your editor and the Oracle never get into a feedback loop with each other.

Why this is the only capture surface

There is one capture surface. There is no inbox, no quick-add, and no separate hotkey pad. The simplicity is deliberate. Every captured thought passes through the same pipeline, picks up the same conviction score, and is searchable the same way later. Splitting capture into several sub-modes would fragment the Library without adding anything you could trust.