Menu bar & settings

The menu-bar icon, settings, where your data lives, and diagnostics.

cap lives in the menu bar — there is no Dock icon or main window.

Search Captures… — opens the search window (same as ⌥⇧Space)
Update available — appears when a newer release exists; copies the brew upgrade command
Failed enrichments: N — appears when page fetches have failed; run cap refetch or re-capture the page to retry
Settings… (⌘,) and Quit cap (⌘Q)

The bookmark icon switches to a slashed variant when something needs attention: failed enrichments, a startup problem, or lost Accessibility access — in that last case a menu item deep-links to the right pane of System Settings.

Settings

Hotkeys — rebind capture (⌃⌥C) and search (⌥⇧Space)
Fetch page content for link captures — turn off cap’s network fetch entirely; bodies then come only from browser tabs
Check weekly for a new version — turn off the update check

That’s the whole settings surface. There is no configuration file; the only environment variable is CAP_DIR, which moves the storage root (default ~/Library/Application Support/cap/) for the app, agent, and CLI together.

Where your data lives

Path	Contents
`cap.sqlite`	every capture, plus the full-text index
`assets/`	captured images, content-addressed by hash
`agent.lock`	lock file proving a live agent

All inside the storage root. Backing up that folder — or cap export, whose JSON carries every stored field — is a complete backup.

Permissions

cap asks for two permissions, both optional:

Accessibility — reading your selected text, and detecting password fields so capture can refuse them. Without it, capture uses the clipboard fallback only.
Automation (Apple Events) — asking Safari, Chrome, or Arc for the front tab’s URL and title. macOS prompts once per browser.

macOS silently revokes Accessibility when an app’s code signature changes, which can happen across updates. cap detects this and prompts to re-grant; the menu-bar icon degrades until access is restored.

Diagnostics

cap status reports queue depth and ETA, capture counts by state, database size, and agent health. cap doctor checks database integrity, rebuilds the search index, sweeps orphaned image files, verifies (and reinstalls) the launchd agent, and reports Accessibility state.

For a live view of what cap is doing:

log stream --predicate 'subsystem == "dev.jxd.cap"'

Log categories are capture, pipeline, store, and agent.