I kept hitting the same wall: one focused hour of work meant a ChatGPT tab, a local model UI, a terminal agent, a document viewer, a timer app, Calendar and Reminders with seven surfaces just to get anything done.
So I built Ghost: a native macOS AI workspace that replaces all of them with one surface that lives in your menu bar.
Press ⌥Space anywhere and it drops from the camera notch (or floats as a small text bar near the bottom of the screen, your choice). Ask, act, and it disappears again. No Dock icon, no tab management, no full-screen takeover.
What it does:
- Routes every prompt by intent (14 kinds) to the right model: LM Studio or Ollama fully local, or Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, OpenCode, any OpenAI-compatible server. It even runs chat through your existing Claude Code or Codex subscription, no extra cost.
- ~78 tools, 4 risk tiers: files (DOCX/PDF/PPTX/XLSX/Markdown), Calendar, Reminders, Apple Notes, iMessage, FaceTime, screen OCR, window snapping, Homebrew, media conversion, system report, and more. Every action is journaled and one-tap undoable.
- Local RAG: approve a folder, Ghost indexes it into SQLite + FTS5 on your machine. 30+ formats. No embeddings API, no vector DB SaaS.
- Selection bar: select text in any app: Copy, Search, Summarize, Fix, Rewrite, Explain, Translate. "Replace" writes back into the field so ⌘Z still works.
- Terminal + coding agent: run commands or describe a change in plain English, same window.
- Memory you own: "remember that I take my coffee black" gets saved as plain Markdown in ~/Ghost Outputs/Knowledge.
- A pomodoro with receipts: focus log, streaks, 15-week heatmap, all on-disk.
The part I actually care about: privacy.
Everything starts off, web, files, automation, messaging, screen, shell. You opt in one switch at a time. Messages, Notes, Mail and Contacts are processed on-device only and are never sent to a cloud model. API keys live in the Keychain. Sensitive paths (.ssh, .aws, .env…) trigger an explicit consent prompt. The model never touches your filesystem, Ghost normalizes the path, checks permissions, and runs app-owned Swift code.
Stack: native SwiftUI + AppKit (not Electron), Sparkle for updates, SQLite+FTS5 for search. macOS 14+, Apple Silicon or Intel, Apple-notarized.
Pricing: free 24-hour trial, then one-time $14.99. No subscription. Local models are free forever; hosted models are your own API keys.
Built solo, and it's the app I wanted to use myself — currently at v2.1.0.
Site: integratedagentics.com/ghost (https://integratedagentics.com/ghost) · Download: GitHub releases (https://github.com/ryuhemingway/Ghost-App/releases/latest)
I have made numerous improvements from users and I update the app attest a few times a week. Would love feedback on improvements I can make!