--- title: Getting started description: Install TabMind in 5 minutes and turn your open tabs into a searchable knowledge graph. sidebar_position: 1 ---
TabMind is a local-first browser knowledge graph. It watches your open tabs, links them to the entities (people, projects, papers, repos) you care about, and gives you a keyboard-first search bar to pull any of it back — even if you closed the tab a week ago.
This guide walks you from zero to a synced knowledge graph across two devices in about five minutes.
> Privacy first. No tab URLs, titles, or extracted text ever leave your > devices unless you explicitly enable a sync provider. See > [Security](./security) for the full data flow.
| What | Why |
| ------------- | ------------------------------------------- |
| Chromium 115+ | Required for the Tab Groups + side-panel APIs we rely on. Chrome, Brave, Edge, Arc, and Vivaldi all qualify. |
| ~30 MB disk | Local index (SQLite via sql.js). |
| Optional: API key from one of our [providers](./providers) | Unlocks cloud LLM extraction and cross-device sync. |
TabMind ships in three flavors — pick the one that matches your workflow.
The extension is the lightest install and shares storage with your browser profile, so uninstall is one click.
1. Visit the [Chrome Web Store listing][cws] (the same URL serves Brave and
Edge — they reuse Chrome's extension registry).
2. Click Add to browser → confirm the permissions dialog.
3. Pin the TabMind icon to your toolbar (optional but recommended for
Ctrl/⌘+Shift+K).
[cws]: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/tabmind/PLACEHOLDER
The desktop build is for users who want TabMind outside any browser sandbox — useful for power users running multiple browser profiles, or for sharing state with non-Chromium browsers (Firefox/Safari) on the same machine.
`bash
`The installer drops a tabmind binary and registers the tabmind:// URL
scheme so links from your terminal or tmux jump straight into the app.
`bash
git clone https://github.com/seele-agency/tabmind.git
cd tabmind
pnpm install
pnpm tauri:dev # desktop app with hot reload
pnpm ext:dev # loads the extension unpacked at .output/chrome-mv3
`
When TabMind opens for the first time you'll see the Welcome tour:
1. Choose your storage mode. - Local only — pure on-device SQLite. Nothing leaves your machine. - Sync via … — pick a [provider](./providers) (WebDAV, Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud Drive, or self-hosted S3-compatible). 2. Grant optional permissions. - Read tab titles + URLs — required. - Read page content on demand — improves entity extraction; can be turned off per-domain. - Capture screenshots — surfaces visual previews in search results; strictly opt-in. 3. Set a master passphrase if you want at-rest encryption of the local index. The passphrase never leaves the device — losing it means losing the index. We do not have a reset flow.
Open five random tabs. Click the TabMind icon (or hit Ctrl/⌘+Shift+K).
Type today. You should see all five tabs, ranked by recency and relevance,
plus any entities TabMind auto-extracted from them (e.g. a person's name,
the name of a library, a paper title).
Hit Enter to switch to the top result. Tab cycles through the list.
Ctrl/⌘+Enter opens the result in a new tab. The full shortcut list lives
on the [Keyboard shortcuts](#keyboard-shortcuts) page below.
Sync is optional. To enable it:
1. Open the side panel → Settings → Sync. 2. Pick a provider. Each provider page links to setup steps ([WebDAV](./providers#webdav), [Dropbox](./providers#dropbox), etc.). 3. Authorize TabMind via the OAuth or app-password flow your provider requires. 4. Hit Push now — the first sync uploads your index (encrypted with your master passphrase if you set one in step 2).
On a second device, install TabMind, choose Sync via …, point at the same provider, and Pull. Indices converge via CRDT, so concurrent edits merge without conflicts.
For the gory details, see [Sync architecture](./sync/architecture).
TabMind's killer feature is the graph view. Two ways to populate it:
Hit g in the side panel to pin the current tab as a node. A second
g on a different tab creates an edge if TabMind detects a shared entity;
otherwise the graph view asks you to label the relation.
If you enabled a cloud [LLM provider](./providers#openai), TabMind extracts entities and relations in the background as you browse. Extraction runs only on the active tab, once per URL per 24 hours, and the prompt is auditable from Settings → Privacy → Extraction prompt.
You can also wire a local Ollama endpoint from Settings → Providers → Local LLM — no data leaves the box.
| Shortcut | Action |
| --------------------- | --------------------------------------- |
| Ctrl/⌘+Shift+K | Open TabMind command bar |
| Ctrl/⌘+Shift+F | Full-text search across the index |
| Ctrl/⌘+Shift+G | Toggle graph view |
| g | Pin / unpin current tab in the graph |
| Ctrl/⌘+Enter | Open result in new tab |
| Shift+Enter | Open result in background tab |
| Esc | Close side panel |
| ? | Show all shortcuts in-app |
Welcome to fewer lost tabs. 🐸