New Open Source Tool Turns Your Screen Activity Into Searchable Markdown Notes
A developer has released Ambient Context, an open source project that captures a running record of your screen activity as plain text rather than images. Instead of snapping and storing screenshots, the tool extracts on-screen text in real time and organizes it into Markdown files, creating a lightweight, searchable log of what you were doing and reading throughout the day.
The pitch is simple: many "screen memory" tools for recall or productivity tracking rely on storing screenshots, which eat disk space, raise privacy concerns, and are hard to search. By converting activity straight to text, Ambient Context aims to be smaller, faster to query, and easier to review or pipe into other tools like note-taking apps or local LLMs.
The project is early-stage, posted to Hacker News with modest traction so far, but it taps into a growing niche of local-first "personal context" tools that developers are building to feed memory into AI assistants without relying on cloud screenshot storage.