FAQ

Can I keep my notes off GitHub? Yes. Create the brain without --remote. A local brain commits every change, but nothing ever leaves your machine. Back it up like any other folder.

Can I use it at work? Yes. Messages are plain by default. tone = "cheeky" in [ui] adds a short remark to some of them; --serious turns it off for a single call. Error messages are equally precise in both tones.

Does it send my notes anywhere? Only to your own Git remote, by git push, and only in a synced brain. rcllr has no other network code and no runtime dependencies beyond Node.js.

How fast is it? Fast enough for agents to query before every answer. On an Apple M5 Pro with Node 24, context and find take about 0.13 s in a brain of 200 notes and 0.48 s with 2,000 notes. read takes 0.08 s at either size, and 0.02 s of every call is Node starting up. A real brain of 189 notes on a Mac answers in 0.16 s. To measure your own machine, run pnpm bench in a checkout.

Windows? Yes. CI runs the test suite on Windows with Node 22 and 24. The Git hook and the agent hooks are shell scripts, so they need the bash from Git for Windows. Write paths in rcllr.toml in single quotes or with forward slashes, see Configuration reference. New notes get mode 0600 on macOS and Linux only; on Windows they inherit the folder's access rights, so keep the brain in a folder only you can read.

Why does read say "unavailable" for a file I can see? The file is sensitive, out of scope or outside the note folders. rcllr gives the same answer in all three cases, on purpose. With a narrow --scope, the answer adds that other scopes stay hidden; that hint depends only on your call, never on the file.

Can two agents write at the same time? Yes. A process lock serializes writes, and --expected rejects a change based on an old revision. Across machines, a push that loses the race against another machine fetches, rebases and pushes again, up to three times.

Can I build my own frontend? Yes. @rcllr/core (npm install @rcllr/core) is the library behind the CLI. Read notes through its Access class: it applies the same scope, sensitivity and path rules as the CLI. The package exports no raw note reader, so a frontend cannot skip those rules by accident.