A Mac app that finds a saved link when you have forgotten what it was called.
Ask in plain language. It reads the bookmarks you already have in your browser,
writes a line about each one, and searches them by meaning rather than by matching words.
Important
Searching needs an API key you pay for, from OpenRouter or OpenAI. Turning a question into something that can be compared against your links is the one part that cannot happen on your Mac. It costs thousandths of a cent per question; importing costs about 0.07 cents a link, and the app says what it will cost before it spends anything.
- Ask in your own words — "that 3D-printed part for the drone", not the exact title
- Any language — ask in Portuguese about a page written in English and it still lands
- It admits defeat — when nothing is close enough it says so instead of offering three weak guesses
- Browse without paying — the tag cloud, filtering and every list stay on your Mac
- Your browser is never written to — Unbury reads the bookmarks file and nothing else
- Delete a link for good — deleting here does not delete there, and an import will not bring it back
- Choose who describes your pages — Claude Code, Codex, or a model on OpenRouter
- Ask Unbury — a conversation that runs its own searches and shows you every one it ran
- Updates itself — signed, notarised, and it tells you when there is a new version
Requires macOS 14 or later on Apple Silicon. The published build is arm64 only, and the update feed says so, so an Intel Mac is never offered it. Building from source on an Intel Mac has not been tried.
brew install --cask migsilva89/unbury/unburyThat also links unburyctl, the command-line half, onto your path. Or download the
DMG from Releases or
unbury.migsilva.dev and drag Unbury to
Applications.
Either way, two steps to a working library:
- Open it, and in Settings paste your API key.
- Press Import from browser and pick a profile.
The import shows what it will do before it does it — which profiles it found, which links are new, and roughly what they will cost. Nothing is spent until you press the button.
Find something. Type the question and press Return. It does not search as you type: half a sentence is a different question when the search is by meaning.
Browse what you have. The first screen is your tags, sized by how many links each holds. Choosing several narrows to the links that carry all of them. None of this leaves your Mac.
Ask a question about your collection. Ask Unbury runs the searches itself, rephrases when the first attempt comes back weak, and shows every search it ran and every link it read — including the ones it decided not to use.
From the terminal, the same engine, for when the app misbehaves and you need to know whether it is the engine or the interface at fault:
unburyctl status
unburyctl browsers
unburyctl search "landing gear for the pavo 20"
unburyctl import
unburyctl remove <id or url> --yes
unburyctl restore <url>It ships inside the app, at /Applications/Unbury.app/Contents/MacOS/unburyctl.
Brave, Chrome, Arc, Edge and Vivaldi. Safari and Firefox keep bookmarks in a different format and are not read yet.
A browser's bookmarks file records no visit history, so Unbury cannot tell you what you have never opened. That feature does not exist and is not planned.
| Data | Location | Leaves your Mac? |
|---|---|---|
| Your links and their descriptions | ~/Library/Application Support/Unbury/vault.json |
No |
| The numbers a search is ranked by | ~/Library/Application Support/Unbury/vectors.bin |
No |
| Ask Unbury conversations | ~/Library/Application Support/Unbury/conversations/ |
No |
| Settings | ~/Library/Application Support/Unbury/settings.json |
No |
| Your API keys | macOS Keychain, service com.migsilva.unbury |
No |
Around 3 MB for 600 links. Two things reach the internet and nothing else: the page being described at import, and the question being turned into numbers when you press Return. Browsing, filtering and ranking all happen here — comparing a question against 600 links takes about a millisecond.
Requires macOS 14 or later and Swift 6 (Xcode 16).
git clone https://github.com/migsilva89/unbury.git
cd unbury/app
./build.sh # assemble and sign Unbury.app
./release.sh 0.1.0 # …plus DMG, Apple notarisation and the update feedWithout a Developer ID certificate in your keychain, build.sh signs the app ad hoc and
says so — it runs, but macOS will ask for your keychain again after every build.
release.sh needs notarisation credentials; docs/RELEASING.md has
the one-time setup.
A personal project, made for one person's bookmarks and shared because it might suit yours. It works and it is used daily; there is no support promise and no roadmap.
Something broken, or an idea: open an issue. Pull requests are read —
CONTRIBUTING.md says what is in scope and how to build it — though a
change that argues with a decision in CLAUDE.md will be asked to argue with the reasoning
there first. Never put an API key in an issue: the app's own error messages are written to
avoid printing one, but a screenshot of the settings page will.
A security problem goes in a private advisory, never a public issue. See SECURITY.md.
Why it is built the way it is — including the decisions that look like bugs and are not — is in CLAUDE.md. Read it before changing anything.
MIT. The third-party software Unbury links and ships, and its licences, are listed in THIRD-PARTY.md.