fimemory MCP server

FIMemory

A local store your AI tools can read, once connected and told to.

FIMemory (FI Memory, by Future Industries) keeps your notes on your own computer, and connects your AI tools to them so you stop re-explaining the same project every session. The store is an ordinary folder of your own files: no proprietary format, no server, no account, nothing uploaded anywhere. New stores are encrypted at rest by default. You choose a passphrase, a 24-word recovery phrase prints once, and the files stay private wherever they travel: a git host, a cloud backup, a USB stick. Prefer files you can open in a text editor directly? Plaintext is one explicit choice away at setup, and an encrypted store exports back to readable Markdown any time, gated by nothing but your key.

Start here

Two commands.

npm i -g fimemory
fimemory setup

If that first command fails with EACCES: permission denied (common on macOS, where npm's default global folder is root-owned), give npm a folder you own and retry. No sudo needed:

npm config set prefix ~/.npm-global
echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.npm-global/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.zshrc && source ~/.zshrc
npm i -g fimemory

Then close and reopen any AI tool that was already running, because they read their settings when they start.

That is the whole install. setup creates the store if you do not have one, connects every AI tool it finds on this machine, then checks its own work and prints what landed and what did not. Running it again is safe and boring: everything already in place reports unchanged and nothing is rewritten. When you are not sure whether it worked, run it again.

Creating a store on a terminal, setup walks you through encryption: you choose a passphrase (or press one key to opt out with --plaintext), it prints your 24-word recovery phrase once and asks you to prove you wrote it down, then leaves the store unlocked on this machine for about 8 hours. In a script or CI there is no prompt: pass --passphrase "...", set GESTALT_PASSPHRASE, or say --plaintext. With none of those it refuses cleanly rather than guessing. Lose both the passphrase and the 24-word phrase and the data is gone, by design; that is what "your key, not our servers" costs, and the guided run will not let it happen silently.

One step setup cannot finish for you is Claude Code, which manages its own config file. setup checks whether the claude command exists on this machine: if it does, it prints a single claude mcp add line for you to paste. If it does not (the VSCode extension and the desktop app install no command line), it prints the exact JSON block and the file to put it in instead. Either way it lands under Next steps rather than scrolling past.

If a step fails, the run keeps going and the failure gets its own line. Fix that line, run fimemory setup again, and the steps that already worked stay put.

Three commands you will want later: