Terrella

A small working model of your world.

The people, books, ideas, projects and goals in your life, and the connections between them, in one file on your Mac.

See how it works

Coming to the Mac App Store · macOS 14 or later

Terrella on macOS: every category in the sidebar with counts, a list of entries, and a project's page listing what it develops, requires, supports and uses.

The problem

Five things. Five apps that have never heard of each other.

You met someone at a conference. They recommended a book. The book gave you an idea. The idea became a project. The project serves a goal you've had for years.

Every one of those is filed somewhere different, and the thread running through them, the part that was actually worth keeping, is filed nowhere at all.

  • Imogen Blackwood
  • recommended →
  • Fieldwork in Ordinary Places
  • introduced me to →
  • Retrieval is the hard half
  • inspired →
  • Terrella
  • supports →
  • Ship Terrella 1.0

Relationships

Write it down once. Read it from both ends.

Record that someone works at a company, and her page says works at while the company's page says employs. Nothing you write down is findable only if you remember where you filed it.

  • works at⇄employs
  • recommended⇄was recommended by
  • introduced me to⇄came to me through
  • wrote⇄written by
  • reports to⇄manages
A person's page in Terrella, showing relationships grouped by type, with backlinks and the things sitting two hops away.
Every connection grouped by what it is, with backlinks and the things sitting two hops away.

Retrieval

Answers a folder of notes can't give you.

Who else do I know at this company? What came to me through this person? How am I connected to her? Why am I doing this project at all?

Search reaches every kind of thing at once, so a note, a topic, a skill and a person turn up in the same list, and every entry shows the chain of relationships leading back to you.

Search results spanning a skill, a topic, a person and a note, beside a detail pane showing the connection path from Jordan Avery to Kestrel Institute in two steps.
Two steps away, through the relationships above.

What it holds

Twelve kinds of thing, in one searchable file.

The quick capture sheet in Terrella, showing all twelve entity types in a grid with Person selected and a name being typed.
⌘N for anything new. ⌘K to jump to anything you've got.

Your data

One file. On your Mac. Nowhere else.

Terrella has no account, no server and no network access at all, because the sandbox denies it. It works with the Wi-Fi off, because it never needed the Wi-Fi on.

  • Nothing is collectedNo analytics, no tracking, no telemetry. There is nowhere for it to go.

  • Backups take themselvesA consistent copy of the database, taken at launch and kept, openable by any SQLite tool.

  • Export is readableThe whole graph as JSON you can open in a text editor. It's your life; you should be able to read it.

  • Nothing is destroyed quietlyMerging, retyping and ending a relationship all tell you exactly what will change before you commit.

Terrella's merge sheet listing exactly what will happen: which record survives, how many relationships move across, which fold together, and which values are gained.
Two entries for the same person, folded together, with the consequences spelled out first.