Your day, as it happened

A private timeline of the apps you use.
It never leaves your Mac.

Download for macOS Install with Homebrew Source on GitHub

macOS 14 Sonoma or later · Free and open source · Not yet signed — what that means

Replay's Today view: a headline of hours active, a focus goal, and the day's sessions listed in order.

It records two things

Which application is in front, and when you were away from the keyboard. That is the entire input. Everything Replay shows you is built from those two facts.

No permissions

Not Accessibility, not Automation, not Screen Recording. Replay reads which app is frontmost through a standard macOS signal that every app can already see. If a feature seemed to need a permission, it was the wrong feature.

It cannot see inside your windows

No window titles, no documents, no URLs, no keystrokes, no screenshots. It can tell you that you spent four hours in an editor, and nothing whatsoever about what you wrote.

Nothing is uploaded

No account, no cloud, no telemetry, no analytics. Your record is one SQLite file in your own user folder. Nothing recorded is ever transmitted anywhere, under any setting.

It describes, it does not grade

No score, no productivity rating, no “distracting” label on anything. A day that was mostly a browser is described as a day mostly in a browser.

The whole record, in order

Days newest first, split into the parts of the day you actually name — morning, afternoon, late night. Sessions group the runs of related work; the gaps between them are shown too, and labelled honestly as time away or time not recorded.

Add a note, a tag or a bookmark to any session. Search by name, note, tag or app.

Replay's Timeline: sessions grouped by day part, with the breaks between them labelled.

And what you were doing a year ago

Memories surfaces what this date looked like a week, a month, or two years back — your longest focus, your busiest day, the first time you opened something.

The year grid shades each day against fixed amounts of time rather than against the busiest day in view, so a quiet month and a heavy one do not look the same.

Replay's Memories view: cards for notable moments, and a year heatmap of daily activity.

Install it

Two ways, trading the same thing in opposite directions. A prebuilt download is installed in seconds. A build from source takes a couple of minutes and wants Xcode. Both open without a warning; they get there differently, and the difference is worth a sentence.

The quick way — prebuilt

brew trust --tap nurkamol/tap
brew install --cask nurkamol/tap/replay-app

Straight into /Applications, no developer tools. The first line is not optional — Homebrew 6 will not load a third-party tap until you say you trust it, and the refusal looks like a broken tap rather than a consent prompt. It opens with no warning because the tap clears the quarantine flag for you — which means macOS did not check it, and here is what did.

The quiet way — built here

brew trust --tap nurkamol/tap
brew install nurkamol/tap/replay-app-source
brew install nurkamol/tap/replay        # the command-line reader

Compiled on your Mac, so it is never downloaded, never quarantined, and there is no check to skip. Then link it once so Spotlight and the Dock find it:
ln -sfn "$(brew --prefix)/opt/replay-app-source/Replay.app" /Applications/Replay.app

Or download the app

No tools needed — but macOS will refuse to open it the first time, and you should know why before you meet the dialog.

Get the latest release

“Apple could not verify Replay is free of malware”

You will see this if you download the zip from the releases page. It offers only Move to Trash or Cancel, which reads far worse than it is: the message is about a missing certificate, not about anything found in the app. Every unsigned Mac app gets it. A Developer ID costs 99 USD a year and this project does not have one yet.

The Homebrew cask does not show it, and you should know why. The tap clears the quarantine flag after installing, so macOS never runs its check. What replaces that check is Homebrew verifying the download against the SHA-256 in the cask — a real check, but one published by the same project that publishes the app. If you would rather Apple’s check applied, build from source: that copy is compiled on your Mac and never downloaded, so there is nothing to skip.

  1. Try to open Replay once, and dismiss the warning.
  2. Open System Settings ▸ Privacy & Security, scroll down, click Open Anyway.
  3. Confirm. It opens normally from then on.

Or one line in a terminal, which does the same thing:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Replay.app

Right-click ▸ Open does not work. That bypass existed for years and Apple removed it in macOS 15 — it is still the advice in most projects’ instructions.

The rest of it

Twenty screens are built from those same two facts — which app was in front, and when you were away. Nothing below is a mock-up; each is the app running against a real record.

Canvas: applications and projects drawn as a field of connected icons on a dark background.
Canvas Your whole history as a landscape you can fly through — every application and project a real icon, joined to the things it appears alongside. Pan keeps gliding after a flick, pinch zooms, and clicking a node opens whatever it stands for.
This Week: a bar chart of daily activity, the app combinations that recur, and the most-used apps.
This Week Seven days as one shape, with your daily rhythm plotted hour by hour, the app combinations that keep recurring, and what you spent the week actually in.
Apps: every application ranked by time, each with a proportional bar.
Apps Every application you have used, ranked by time, over any span you pick. Each one opens onto its own history — when you started using it, and what you tend to use beside it.
Projects: cards for recurring app combinations, each named and showing its sessions.
Projects The app combinations that keep coming back, found rather than filed. Replay names them descriptively — “Research · Firefox”, “Development · Terminal” — and you can rename any of them.
Collections: sessions grouped into Research, Development, Communication and Utilities.
Collections Every session of one kind gathered together, with its running totals and the apps that defined it. Derived from the category a session already has, so there is nothing to sort by hand.
Story: cards for My Story, Autobiography, Chapters and Museum, above a list of daily rituals.
Story The long view — your history divided into the eras it naturally fell into, told back a month at a time, and the best of it curated. Underneath, the rituals: what you usually begin with, and what each part of the day tends to lead with.
A past day reopened, with a written summary of the day above its sessions.
Any day, reopened A day told back in a few plain sentences, every clause filled from what was actually recorded. A day too thin to narrate honestly gets no story rather than a padded one.
Search results for the word research, matching a collection and five projects.
Search Sessions, notes, tags, projects and apps at once. A few phrases are understood rather than matched — “morning work” or “last friday” go straight to that slice instead of looking for the words.
The command palette open over the Canvas, listing surfaces to jump to.
Command palette ⌘K reaches every surface, application, project and recent day by name, along with the actions that are not places — start the screensaver, export, pause tracking.
Replay's Settings window, General pane, showing theme, surface and launch options.
Settings Theme and accent, which surface opens on launch, menu-bar-only mode, excluded applications, how long to keep history, and export as Markdown, HTML, PDF, CSV or JSON. Privacy has a live check that recording is working — with no permission behind it.
Settings, Privacy pane: a banner reading Everything stays on this Mac, the one permission Replay asks for, and counts of what is stored.
Settings ▸ Privacy What is stored, in numbers, with the database’s exact path — and the only permission Replay ever asks for, which is notifications, for the recaps. It records, remembers and shows your history whether or not you grant it.
Ambient mode: a large clock and today's total on an otherwise black full screen.
Ambient mode For a second screen you glance at rather than sit in front of. The time, today’s total, and what you are in right now. Each line can be turned off — a second monitor is often one other people can see.
The screensaver: sessions drifting slowly upward with their app icons and times.
Screensaver The day drifting past, slowly, with the clock in the corner. It never starts itself unless you ask it to — a thing that takes over the screen on its own is the sort of surprise this app should not spring.

Checked, not promised

Replay is a native Swift port of an app that already ships. The two are compared by a generated contract — the reference’s own constants, copy and formats, extracted automatically — so the port cannot drift from it quietly.

951contract checks
115behaviour cases
0external dependencies
0permissions requested