macOS
File management
for working with AI.
Your folders, your terminal, and your AI in one window. Instead of running Obsidian and Cursor side by side, you work in a single place.
And from your iPhone or iPad, anywhere, you reach the Mac at home. Answer the agent you left running while you are on the train.
macOS 14 or later. No account needed.
Stop running two apps at once.
Arranging your files so an AI can work with them has become normal. But if that means moving between two apps all day, you have added work, not removed it.
Where your material lives
Notes and assets sit here. The terminal is somewhere else. Every switch breaks your train of thought.
Where the AI runs
Agents run in the terminal. Checking what they produced means yet another window.
After you walk away
An agent runs for five minutes, or thirty. Nobody is watching the screen while it does.
Bring scattered places
together in one sidebar.
In the Finder, the only things you can put under a folder are the things inside it. The Atriens sidebar works differently. Footage on an external drive can sit under a project in your Documents folder.
Not one file moves.
The sidebar is a map of where things are. Rearrange it, copy within it, and the files stay exactly where they were. Nothing disappears, nothing gets duplicated.
Hang unrelated places under one project
Assets on a NAS, recordings on an external drive, the brief in your Documents folder. All under one project.
Group by meaning
Client work, writing, experiments. Grouped the way you think about them, not the way the disk is laid out.
Give things names you recognise
What the sidebar shows can differ from the folder name. proj_2026_a can simply read “Project A”.
One terminal per folder.
Type commands in the folder you are already looking at. Switch folders and the terminal follows. You never type cd.
See the state at a glance
Running, waiting for you, finished. The tab colour and mark tell you which.
Get told when it matters
When work finishes, or when something needs your answer, a macOS notification arrives.
Pick up where you left off
Atriens remembers what was running when you quit, and offers to resume it next time.
Reach the Mac at home,
from anywhere.
You get into the Mac at home over the internet. Read its terminal and type into it. Your sidebar and folders open the same way, down to the contents of a file. On the same Wi‑Fi it connects directly; away from home it switches to a relay on its own.
Get in from outside
From the iPhone in your pocket, or the iPad in your bag, to the Mac at home. Everything is encrypted between the two devices, and the relay cannot read it.
Read it, and type into it
The terminal running on your Mac appears as it is, reflowed to the width of the screen in your hand. On iPad the list sits on the left and the terminal on the right.
Your folders come with you
The folders you registered on the Mac, in your hand. Go into folders and check text, images and PDFs.
If you use Obsidian
Your vaults, already in the sidebar.
Atriens reads the vaults Obsidian already knows about and puts them in your sidebar. Nothing to configure, nothing to retype. You do not have to leave Obsidian.
No registering twice
It reads the list Obsidian keeps. Add a vault there and it appears here too.
A terminal right beside it
Open a vault and its terminal is in the same window. Handing your notes to an AI takes one step.
Still opens in Obsidian
Right click to open it there. Write in Obsidian, find and move things here.
Your AI bill stays yours.
Atriens does not sell inference. Point it at a model running on your own Mac, or at your own API key. Using it more does not make a monthly bill grow.
Pricing
Everything on your Mac is free. You only pay to use it from an iPhone or iPad.
Start with the free part.
Everything Atriens does on your Mac is free, with no time limit. No account, no email address.
Features
What Atriens does
The sidebar, the terminal, previews, and your iPhone and iPad. Everything that fits in one window.
plan.md
- Kind
- Markdown document
- Size
- 12 KB
- Modified
- 2026/08/22 08:31
- Created
- 2026/06/11 16:40
Draft proposal
What we are doing and how. The numbers are not final.
- Take stock of what exists
- Find the gaps
- Estimate the cost
The sidebar
Arranged the way you think, not the way the disk is laid out.
Categories
Group folders by meaning. Name the categories whatever you like.
Nesting
Hang footage from an external drive under a project in Documents. The files never move.
Display names
What the sidebar shows can differ from the folder name. The folder itself is untouched.
Colours and icons
Give each place a colour and a symbol. Your own images work too.
Shelf
A holding place for files gathered from anywhere. Move them somewhere else together.
Pinned and recent
Pin what you use often. Recently opened folders and files line up on their own.
Smart folders
Saved searches. Run the same query again whenever you need it.
Obsidian vaults
Reads the vaults Obsidian already knows about and puts them in the sidebar. Nothing to register twice.
Cloud and volumes
iCloud, Google Drive and external drives appear in the same sidebar.
Looking at files, and working on them
Four views
Icon, list, column and gallery. Switch with ⌘1 to ⌘4.
Tabs
Keep several places open and move between them.
Quick Look
Press space to see inside. Markdown is shown rendered, not as markup.
Rename in place
Press Return to edit the name. Characters are never dropped mid-composition in Japanese, Chinese or Korean input.
Command palette
⇧⌘P reaches every place and every action from the keyboard.
Git status
See which files changed, and read the diff.
Image and PDF chores
Convert, resize, merge PDFs. The everyday jobs are built in.
Zip and unzip
Create and extract archives without leaving the window.
Add your own actions
Register the commands you type often as right-click menu items.
Draft proposal
What we are doing and how. The numbers are not final.
Tasks
- Take stock of what exists
- Find the gaps
- Estimate the cost
How we work
A short weekly check against docs/plan.md.
| Phase | Work | Owner |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Stocktake | Me |
| 2 | Prototype | Me |
| 3 | Review | Everyone |
Notes
Step by step details live in README.md.
The terminal
A real terminal, tied one to one with a folder.
One per folder
Type in the folder you are already looking at. You never type cd.
Tell the state apart
Running, waiting for you, finished. Visible on the tab and in the list.
Notifications
A macOS notification when something needs you. Different sounds for different kinds.
Resume next launch
Atriens remembers what was running when you quit and offers to start it again.
GPU drawing
Drawn with Metal, so fast output does not get dropped.
Split panes
Watch the terminals of several folders at once.
Colour schemes
Eight schemes, or follow the system. Line spacing is adjustable too.
How it works with AI
We do not sell inference
Point it at a model running on your own Mac, or at your own API key. Using it more does not raise a bill from us.
Your material stays with you
Nothing has to be uploaded anywhere. What you register in the sidebar stays inside your Mac.
Also
32 languages
Switching takes effect at once, with no restart. See the list
Signed and notarised
Signed and notarised by Apple. It opens without a warning.
Several Macs
Register as many as you like in your hand. Move between the one at home and the one at work.
From your iPhone and iPad (in preparation)
Reach the Mac at home,
from anywhere.
You do not have to be on the same Wi‑Fi. Work running on the Mac you left at home is there on your iPhone, on a train or in another city, to read and to type into. When an agent stops and asks you something, answer it and let it carry on. It runs on iPad too. One app, at no extra cost.
What you can do
Read the terminal, and type into it
The terminal running on your Mac appears as it is, reflowed to the width of the screen in your hand so it stays readable. You can type into it, of course.
See which one is waiting for you
Running, waiting for an answer, finished. Tell them apart in one list.
Your folders, as they are
The categories and folders you arranged on the Mac, in your hand. Display names and nesting come with them.
Check what is inside a file
Text in a monospaced font, images and PDFs as they look. Pinch to zoom. Markdown switches between rendered and raw.
Move what the Mac is showing
Open a place in your hand and the Mac follows. When you sit back down, you carry on from there.
Several Macs
Register as many as you like and move between the one in the study and the one at work, from one app.
Draft proposal
What we are doing and how. The numbers are not final.
Tasks
- Take stock of what exists
- Find the gaps
- Estimate the cost
How we work
A short weekly check.
Notes
Step by step details live in the README.
Next
- Write down the assumptions
- Decide the scope of the prototype
- Put a date on it
Background
Earlier records are collected in docs. The first paragraph is enough.
On iPad, side by side.
There is room for the list on the left and the terminal on the right, at the same time. Same app.
The list and the work at once
Watch which one is waiting for you on the left while you type on the right. No going back and forth.
A real keyboard works
esc, the arrows and ctrl are picked up from a hardware keyboard. With a Magic Keyboard it is the same hands as on the Mac.
Beside another app
Keep your notes open in Split View while you work. When the width gets narrow it goes back to the iPhone layout.
Connecting
Scan one QR code, once. After that you just pick it from a list.
Turn it on, on the Mac
In Settings, open the iPhone & iPad tab and turn on “Allow iPhone and iPad Access”. A QR code appears.
Scan it in your hand
Use the Atriens app, or the camera on your iPhone or iPad.
Then just open it
On the same Wi‑Fi it connects directly. Away from home it goes through a relay. Either way, automatically.
See this Mac’s terminal from Atriens on your iPhone, and type into it. Direct on the same Wi-Fi, through the relay when you are out.
Making a new one disconnects every iPhone you registered. Scan the code again.
At home, or away
There is only one thing to set up. On the same Wi‑Fi it connects directly; further away it goes through a relay, and Atriens switches between them for you. Nothing to choose in your hand.
| Same Wi‑Fi (direct) | Away (relay) | |
|---|---|---|
| Path | Mac and the device in your hand, directly | One hop through a relay |
| Speed | Fastest | Depends on the connection |
| Encryption | End to end | End to end (the relay cannot read it) |
| What it needs | A paid plan | A paid plan |
The relay cannot read what it carries.
Everything is encrypted between your Mac and the device in your hand. What the relay moves is a sealed string it cannot open. The key is handed over by the QR code and never stored on the server.
Pricing
You can buy it once.
If you would rather not pay every month, pay once instead. Using Atriens on your Mac alone costs nothing at all.
Prices are in Japanese yen and include tax.
What you get
- Free
- The sidebar, the terminal, previews, Git, the command palette, Obsidian vaults. Everything Atriens does on your Mac, with no time limit.
- What paying adds
- Using Atriens from an iPhone or iPad. Read your Mac's terminal and type into it, open your sidebar and folders, check what is inside a file. On the same Wi‑Fi or away from home.
- One-time purchase
- Covers the major version you bought (1.x) with no time limit, including every fix in that line. When a new major version (2.0) arrives, we will offer you an upgrade at a reduced price.
- Subscription
- While you are paying, you always have the latest version. New major versions cost nothing extra.
- Number of Macs
- One license covers up to three Macs at a time. There is no limit on iPhones and iPads.
- AI costs
- None from us. Atriens does not sell inference, so use a local model or your own API key.
- Payment
- Credit card (Visa / Mastercard / American Express / JCB). Stripe handles the payment; we never hold your card details.
Questions about pricing
Comparison
If you run Obsidian
and Cursor side by side.
Both are good tools. Atriens only takes over the part where you move between them. Where it loses, we say so.
 Atriens |
Obsidian |
 Cursor |
|
|---|---|---|---|
| Main job | Folder management plus a terminal | Writing and linking notes | Writing code, handing it to AI |
| Works across the whole disk | Yes | Inside the vault only | Inside the open project only |
| An order of its own | Yes | No (folders as they are) | No |
| Terminal in the same window | Built in | No (plugin) | Yes |
| As a writing tool | Preview only | Very strong | Capable |
| As a code editor | None | None | Very strong |
| Drive your Mac from an iPhone or iPad | Yes | No (sync only) | No |
| AI usage costs | None (bring your own) | None | Included in the subscription |
| Price | Free / ¥780 mo · ¥6,800 yr · ¥14,800 once | Free / sync from $4 mo | $20 mo |
Based on each vendor's website as of September 2026. Prices and terms change.
Being honest
For writing, use Obsidian
Links, the graph, the plugins. Years of work went into writing. Atriens has no writing tool. It puts your vaults in the sidebar so moving between them is easier.
For code, use Cursor
Completion, applying diffs, model quality. They are ahead. Atriens has no editor.
What Atriens takes on
Everything outside those two. How your files are arranged, where the agent runs, and how you follow it after you walk away.
So it is not a replacement
Keep using both. Atriens stands in front of them.
Download
Ready to use.
No account needed. It works the moment you open it. No email address either.
macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later, Apple Silicon. Signed and notarized by Apple.
Requirements
- macOS
- macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later
- Chip
- Apple silicon (M1 or later)
- iPhone and iPad (optional)
- iOS 17 or iPadOS 17 or later. The iPhone and iPad app is still in preparation.
- Signing
- Signed and notarised by Apple. No warning on first launch.
Installing
Download it
Get the disk image from the button above.
Move it to Applications
In the window that opens, drag Atriens into your Applications folder.
Allow access to your folders
The first time, macOS asks about Documents and similar folders. Allow the places you want in your sidebar.
Try everything on the Mac before paying.
The sidebar, the terminal, previews and Git are free with no time limit. You only pay when you want to use Atriens from an iPhone or iPad.
Languages
Available in 32 languages
Switching takes effect at once, with no restart. Every string is translated, and languages that are not fully translated are not offered. Arabic and Hebrew flip the layout right to left.
- 日本語
- English
- Deutsch
- Français
- Español
- Italiano
- Nederlands
- Português
- Português (Brasil)
- Русский
- Polski
- Türkçe
- Svenska
- Dansk
- Suomi
- Norsk bokmål
- Čeština
- Ελληνικά
- Magyar
- Română
- Slovenčina
- Українська
- 简体中文
- 繁體中文
- 한국어
- ไทย
- Tiếng Việt
- Bahasa Indonesia
- Bahasa Melayu
- हिन्दी
- العربية
- עברית
Wording follows Apple's own macOS terminology.
Words like “window”, “Trash” and “Quick Look” match the terms Apple uses in that language. Machine translation alone leaves an app speaking differently from everything else on the Mac.
If your language is missing, tell us through the contact form.
FAQ
What people ask before buying
Every answer is here, not folded away. Anything else, use the contact form.
THE NAME
Every room
opens onto it.
At the centre of a Roman house was a hall, open to the sky through a square gap in the roof, where light and rain came down. We shortened the name of the person who kept it.
Background: Luigi Bazzani, “The atrium of the House of Cornelius Rufus, Pompeii”, 1913. Public domain
About that hall
atrium, the central hall
The open space at the heart of a Roman house. Light fell through a square opening in the roof (the compluvium) and rain collected in a sunken basin in the floor (the impluvium). Every room opened onto it.
-ensis, the one who belongs to it
Attached to a place, it names the person of that place. Attached to atrium, the one who belongs to the hall. In other words, its keeper.
Together they make atriensis: the steward who kept the hall, the household records and the staff. He knew where everything was and produced it before he was asked. Drop the ending and you have Atriens.
The same job
Everything opens onto one place
Folders, the terminal and your AI all face a single window. You stop moving between apps because there is a hall.
Produce it before it is asked for
The steward's job was to remember where everything was. Remember the places in your sidebar and open them at once. The job has not changed.
Navy and gold
Navy is the hall at night
Atrium still names the tall open space in a good hotel. A deep navy is the colour of a place that receives you.
Gold is the light coming down
Light through the opening, caught by the basin. Gold marks only the thing we want you to press. It is never decoration.
Saying it
AY-tree-enz
Three syllables, stress on the first.
The spelling does not change
Atriens or atriens, nothing else. No inner capital, no abbreviation.
More than forty candidates were checked before this one.
English words that bring an image to mind are being taken one after another by AI developer tools. Going back to Latin finally turned up a word still free.
THE STORY
Why we built
a file manager.
You pair Obsidian with an AI, call it a second brain, and then you stop opening it. That happened to us too. So before building anything, we went to look at why the notes stop being read.
A record you stop returning to
It quietly goes quiet
Almost everyone who keeps a Vault has the same shape: a burst of notes at the start, then months where only a handful get touched. A record no one returns to is not a second brain. It is an attic.
Our own Vault, for instance
When we looked, ours held 141 notes, and only two had been opened in the previous three months. That was not a discipline problem. It was worth asking what the Vault was still doing for us.
The index is real, and sealed
Obsidian does keep an index
Inside its application support folder sits a Chromium database, a few hundred megabytes once a Vault has some history, holding the full text of every note it has opened in UTF-16. That is why full text search returns in an instant, the graph draws, and backlinks appear at once.
But it lives inside one process
That index belongs to Electron. An outside tool such as Cursor or Claude Code cannot use a single byte of it. What an AI actually does is grep plain Markdown. So “the Obsidian index makes the AI fast” does not hold, for anyone.
What was really helping the AI
Not the index. The conventions. Attributes written in frontmatter, relations drawn as links, one topic to a file, filenames that read like search terms. All of it is plain text, so an AI reads it as easily as a person does. The discipline travels to any tool. The index travels nowhere.
Why a note goes stale
Not the place, the rule
A note stays current when something writes back to it, and goes stale when nothing does. Put a living document and a frozen one side by side and the difference is never the folder. It is whether there is a rule to append before you use it.
It never says it is old
A frozen list will keep offering the count it had on the day it stopped. One of ours still said five when the real number had grown to sixteen. A file with no rule to update itself does not raise its hand. It just quietly becomes wrong.
So what is the Vault for
Only for the moments a person needs to open a document and read it with their own eyes. And more and more, that stopped happening: you ask the AI for what you need and read it on the spot. Measured honestly, our Obsidian was not even running. A large app and a large index, resting on disk, unopened, while the actual work went on next door in a terminal.
The real obstacle was the screen
Obsidian wants the whole window
It is built to own one. Put a terminal beside it and both go cramped. Keep files, terminal and AI in three separate apps, and you spend the day arranging three windows.
So we put the three in one
With a single window, there is nothing left to arrange. That is the whole reason Atriens exists.
The one thing we carried over
Obsidian already knows which folders are Vaults. Atriens reads that list read only and shows it in the sidebar, most recently opened first. It never rewrites a line of Obsidian's settings. You reach your plain Markdown without waking the app or its index at all.
Not better or worse
For work whose job is to read and think, Obsidian is an excellent tool, and what you accumulate genuinely compounds. This was never about which is better. A second brain a person reads, and a second brain an AI reads and then speaks back from, are simply not the same thing. The first needs a viewer. The second needs its files in the same window as the AI. We built the second one.
Contact
Get in touch
Questions before buying, licensing, bug reports, feature requests. We reply by email within two business days. We will never call you to sell anything.
Received
We sent a copy to the address you gave. You will hear from us within two business days.
If the copy does not arrive, please check your spam folder.
Terms
Terms of Service
The terms under which you use Atriens.
These terms are a translation provided for convenience. In the event of any difference, the Japanese version governs.
1. Scope
These terms apply between LIFE SCAPE, K.K. (“we”) and anyone who uses the macOS application Atriens (“the software”).
2. License
We grant you a non-transferable, non-exclusive right to use the software under these terms. A paid license may be used on up to three Macs at a time. There is no limit on the number of iPhones and iPads.
Copyright and all other rights in the software remain with us. These terms do not transfer them to you.
3. What is free
Using the software on a Mac alone is free, with no time limit. No account is required.
Using it from an iPhone or iPad, whether on the same network or away from it, requires a paid license.
4. Payment and cancellation
A paid license is available monthly, yearly, or as a one-time purchase. A one-time purchase covers the major version current at the time of purchase (1.x), with no time limit.
Monthly and yearly plans renew automatically unless you tell us otherwise before the renewal date. You may cancel at any time; billing stops from the next renewal and you keep access until the end of the period you have paid for. We do not refund partial periods.
5. What you may not do
- Copy, modify, decompile, disassemble or reverse engineer the software
- Transfer, lend or publish your license key
- Use the software for any unlawful purpose or against public order
- Place an unreasonable load on our servers
- Use the software to infringe the rights of others
6. Your data
The files the software works with are inside your Mac. We never obtain their contents.
Traffic between your Mac and the device in your hand is encrypted end to end. The relay forwards it still encrypted, and we cannot decrypt it.
7. Disclaimer
The software is provided as is. We do not warrant that it fits any particular purpose, or that it runs without interruption or error.
Our liability for any damage arising from your use of the software is limited to the amount you have paid us, except in cases of our wilful misconduct or gross negligence.
You are responsible for keeping your own backups of important data.
8. Changes and discontinuation
We may change the software or stop providing it. If we stop providing the relay used for connecting from away, we will notify holders of a paid license at least three months in advance.
9. Governing law
These terms are governed by the laws of Japan. The Tokyo District Court has exclusive jurisdiction of first instance over any dispute concerning the software.
Last updated: 1 September 2026
Legal notice (Japan)
Notice under the
Japanese Act on Specified
Commercial Transactions
Japanese law requires sellers to publish the following details. They are shown here in English for reference; the authoritative version is in Japanese.
Sitemap
Sitemap
Every page on this site, with a note on what each one covers.
Thank you
Your license key is on its way
We sent the key to the email address you entered at checkout. If it has not arrived after a few minutes, please check your spam folder.
Entering the key
- Open Atriens. If you have not installed it yet, start from Download.
- Choose Atriens in the menu bar, then Settings.
- Open License and paste the key from the email.
Checking the key needs no connection, so you can enter it offline. One license covers up to three Macs.