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Almanac Support

Stuck or curious? Email hello@papermint.studio and a human reads every message, usually within a day.

Install. Download Almanac, open the .dmg and drag Almanac to Applications. It needs macOS 15 or later and runs on Apple silicon and Intel.
First open. A short welcome asks whether to open Almanac at login (so its record has no gaps) and whether to show alerts. Then Overview shows your Mac right now: four tiles for CPU, memory, GPU and disk, the apps as circles sized by how much they cost your Mac, and the rest of the readings beside them.
The menu bar. CPU, memory and network appear in the menu bar. Click any of them for a panel with everything at once. Choose which readings show, and whether each is a number, a small graph or both, in Settings › Menu bar. Hold ⌘ and drag them to reorder.
Closing the window. Almanac keeps recording from the menu bar when you close the window. To quit it, use Almanac › Quit Almanac or the power button in the menu bar panel.

Grouped like you think of them. Each app's helpers are counted under the app: every Chrome or Safari tab process under the browser, Xcode's compilers under Xcode, and everything a coding agent starts under that agent. Open a row to see each process with its CPU, memory and power.
Impact. The bar and the circle size combine CPU, memory, GPU, disk and network into one number, so the app that costs your Mac the most is at the top. Sort by CPU, memory, energy, disk or network instead with the buttons at the top.
Parts of macOS. Services that belong to macOS, like WindowServer or Spotlight's indexer, are shown by name in grey and marked Part of macOS. Almanac can't quit them. If one is stuck busy for a long time, restarting your Mac usually settles it, and Almanac says so in an alert.
Quitting. Quit… in an app's row asks first and lists what will close. Quit asks the app to quit as if you chose Quit from its menu; Force quit closes it at once, and anything unsaved is lost. Almanac never quits anything by itself.

What's kept. Every metric and the busiest apps are recorded once a minute for a week, then once an hour. Choose to keep 30 days, 90 days, 6 months or a year in Settings › History.
Looking back. Open a metric in the sidebar and pick 1 h, 24 h, 7 d, 30 d or 1 y. Hover the chart to see the value at that moment and which apps were busiest then. Who used it lists the apps that used the most over the span.
Gaps. Almanac records while it runs. If it was closed or your Mac was asleep, that part of the chart is empty. Turn on Open at login to keep the record unbroken.
Space. A year of history usually takes a few hundred megabytes. Settings › History shows the size and can erase it.

Claude Code and Codex. Coding agents shows each running session: its folder and branch, model, context used, tokens, prompts, tool calls and the processes it started, plus the sessions you finished earlier today and today's use by model and project.
Plan limits for Claude Code. Claude Code shares your plan's limits with its status line. Click Connect Claude Code and Almanac becomes that status line: it records the current session (5-hour) and weekly limits, the context used, Claude Code's cost estimate and the lines changed, and shows a short line under your prompt. Limits appear after Claude Code's next reply, on Pro and Max plans.
What Connect changes. It sets the statusLine entry in ~/.claude/settings.json after saving a copy of the file. If you already had a status line, it keeps running: Almanac passes it the same information and shows what it shows. Disconnect puts your settings back.
Codex. Codex writes its limits into its own session files, so its sessions and limits show with nothing to connect.
Pace. Each limit shows when it resets and whether you'll run out first at the rate you're going.
Ending a session. End… on a session closes it and everything it started, after you confirm.

When Almanac speaks up. An app keeps a CPU core busy for 5 minutes, an app's memory keeps growing for an hour, an app writes more than 5 GB in a day or moves more than 3 GB in an hour, memory pressure turns critical, your Mac stays above 95° for 2 minutes, or the startup disk drops below 10 GB free.
Not too often. Each alert fires once and then waits (usually six hours) before it can fire again for the same app. Mute … today on an alert silences that app until tomorrow.
Turn alerts on or off one by one on the Alerts page, and choose there whether they also appear as notifications.

Temperatures come from the sensors macOS reports: the CPU's average and hottest core, the GPU, the SSD and the battery. Switch between °C and °F in Settings.
Fans. On Apple silicon, fans often rest at 0 rpm until the Mac warms up. Almanac shows their speed; macOS controls them.
Battery shows charge, time left, the power it's drawing, health (today's full capacity compared with when it was new) and cycle count.
Bluetooth and sound. Connected devices that report a battery level are listed, along with the apps playing sound or using the microphone.

Off until you turn it on. In Settings › AI agents, turn on Let AI agents read Almanac. Then Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and other MCP apps can ask what's slowing your Mac, look at history, and see coding-agent sessions and limits.
Connect Claude Code with the command shown in Settings: claude mcp add almanac -- "/Applications/Almanac.app/Contents/MacOS/Almanac" --mcp. Keep Almanac in Applications so the path stays the same after updates.
Quitting stays yours. An agent can ask Almanac to quit an app, but Almanac only opens its own confirmation in its window. Nothing quits unless you confirm there.

Light by design. Almanac reads your Mac every 2 seconds while its window is open and every 5 seconds when only the menu bar is showing. With nothing on screen it uses about 1% of one core; the window doesn't redraw while it's hidden.
Update every in Settings changes how often the window refreshes (1, 2 or 5 seconds).

Automatic. Almanac checks once a day for a new version and installs it inside the app when you choose; it restarts in a few seconds with your history intact.
Check now from Almanac › Check for Updates… or Settings › Updates.
Signed updates. Every update is signed by us and notarized by Apple, and Almanac refuses anything that isn't.

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A person reads every message, usually within a day.