Spaces
Group saves by topic, or keep everything in one home. Spaces in Mindly are your second brain’s rooms, and you decide how many you need.
How it works
When to use it
The default setup. One Space holds your whole life: work, reading, personal, ideas. The AI handles surfacing what is relevant when you search, so less structure does not mean less findable. Most new users stay here for months.
When you have two or three projects that demand separate focus, create a Space for each. Switching context becomes two clicks. The reference material stays where it belongs and stops bleeding into the wrong project.
Work, school, and side hustle in three separate Spaces. Mentally clean, technically connected. Universal search still spans all of them, so cross-Space ideas are not lost just because they sit in different rooms.
Idea, Draft, Done. Move items as they mature. Done items archive without being deleted, so the active Spaces stay focused while the history stays searchable. Good for writers, builders, and anyone with a real pipeline.
How Spaces actually behave
Captures land in your current Space automatically. You do not pick a Space every time you save. The overlay remembers which Space you used last and assumes the next save belongs there.
Tagging, summaries, and suggestions run within the active Space first (so your project view stays focused), but cross-Space connections still surface when you search universally. You do not lose serendipity by separating contexts.
Move an item from one Space to another in one drag. Items can also exist in multiple Spaces simultaneously (no copy required), so a research note that belongs to two projects shows up in both without becoming a duplicate.
Spaces are not a Pro feature. The Free tier supports multiple Spaces from day one. Pro lifts the per-Space item limit and adds bulk-move tools.
Why it matters
Folders demand a decision at the moment you save: which one does this belong to? That decision costs cognitive energy, gets made wrong half the time, and creates the "where did I put that" problem that ends with you searching anyway. Spaces invert the model. You can have one Space and never feel constrained, or many Spaces and feel organized. Either way, the AI handles tagging and surfacing, so you can split or merge Spaces as your projects evolve without losing anything. The cost of structure is paid only when you want it, not by default. That is the difference between an organizational system that survives a year and one that becomes another graveyard.
Common questions
A Space is a top-level container in your library, similar to a notebook or workspace. You can have one Space holding everything, or many Spaces separating projects, roles, or stages. The AI organization runs inside each Space and across the whole library.
The Free tier supports multiple Spaces with shared item limits. Pro removes the per-Space cap entirely. There is no hard maximum on how many Spaces you can create; most users settle on between one and five.
Yes. An item can live in multiple Spaces simultaneously without being duplicated. A research note that belongs to two projects shows up in both Spaces and stays in sync if you edit it.
No. Folders are nested, exclusive, and require a decision at save time. Spaces are top-level, can overlap (items can live in multiple), and let AI organization handle the inside structure. You can still create sub-tags or sub-categories inside a Space if you want, but it is not required.
Not currently. Mindly is built for one-person second brains; sharing is on the roadmap. For now your Spaces are private to your Mac.
Optional. The default setup is a single Space for everything, which works perfectly fine. Add more Spaces only when you feel the seam between contexts. Most users stay on one Space for months.
Also in Mindly
Related reading
Download Mindly, capture for a week, then split into Spaces only if the seam shows. Most people don’t need many.
