Guignol — an RSS reader that writes to your markdown vault

01 — The Vault

A folder on your Mac.
Yours to keep.

Guignol writes every article, every highlight, and every digest to plain markdown files in a folder you choose. No database. No proprietary format. Grep it. Commit it. Sync it with iCloud, Dropbox, or git — or don't sync it at all. When you want out, there's nothing to export, because there was nothing to import.

Configurable vault, highlights, and digests paths.
One markdown file per article, with clean YAML frontmatter.
Import and export OPML for your feed list.

Guignol Settings: three configurable folder paths for the vault, highlights, and digests, plus theme, language, polling interval, and a Claude CLI binary field.

02 — Close reading

Highlight what matters.
Summaries on demand.

Guignol strips the junk and renders every article in a long-form reading view with a serif body, comfortable measure, and keyboard navigation. Mark a passage and it's saved as a highlight in markdown — with a link back to the source. Ask for an AI summary and it lands above the article, or in your digest.

Reader-mode rendering with Iowan Old Style typography.
Highlights saved as one file per article, mirroring the vault.
On-demand AI summary per article, regenerable anytime.

An article opened in Guignol's reader: a generated summary sits above the body, and passages in the article are highlighted in amber with underlines.

03 — Highlights, gathered

Every sentence you saved,
in one place.

A single view gathers every highlight from every feed — filterable by source, full-text searchable, each line linked back to the article it came from. It is, quietly, the most useful page in the app: the distilled web you actually read.

And every highlight is also a markdown line in ~/Guignol/highlights/<article>.md, mirroring your vault — so anything that reads the folder sees exactly what you marked.

Guignol's All Highlights view: highlighted passages from multiple feeds listed one after another, each labelled with its source and date.

04 — Digests

Your week, read for you.

Claude reads what you saved and writes a digest every day, week, or month. Not a summary — a digest. Themes. Through-lines. What repeated.

A Guignol digest for the period January 1 to April 15, 2026: six themed bullets with bold phrases pulled from the sources, each linking back to the articles it drew from.

Daily

Yesterday, in three bullets.

A morning brief of what landed in your feeds overnight, grouped by theme rather than by source.

Weekly

The through-line.

What the week was actually about — the topic every source returned to, written into a single markdown file in your vault.

Monthly

Shifts worth noticing.

Longer arcs: what changed in the conversation, which sources stayed sharp, what you kept re-reading.

05 — Bring your own Claude

No API key.
No subscription.
Your Claude. Your terms.

Every AI feature in Guignol — article summaries, daily, weekly, and monthly digests, anything we add later — runs through the claude CLI installed on your Mac. There is no embedded model. No Guignol API key. No token meter. You install Claude Code, sign in once, and Guignol borrows your session. Your prompts never touch a Guignol server, because there isn't one.

Powered by Claude Code on your Mac, called as a subprocess.
Set the binary path in Settings → Binary Claude CLI.
And of course — once it's all markdown, you can run Claude on the folder yourself.

$ cd ~/Guignol/highlights
$ ls | head -4
2026-04-15-stratechery-open-web.md
2026-04-14-fowler-microservices.md
2026-04-12-anthropic-evals.md
2026-04-09-kohlmeier-attention.md

$ claude -p "What threads run through
       my highlights this week?"

Reading 14 highlights across 6 articles …

Two threads keep returning across what you marked:

  · Evaluation gaps. You highlighted
    "capability vs. disposition" twice and
    underlined "benchmarks measure compliance,
    not safety."

  · A phrase you marked three times across sources:
    "writing as thinking is downstream of
    writing as evidence."

Why local-first

No account. No server. No telemetry. Your feeds, articles, and highlights live in a folder on your Mac. You can sync it with iCloud Drive, Dropbox, or git — or not sync it at all. Guignol does not care. It is software that assumes you will outlive it.

Download

Free. For Mac.

macOS 12 Monterey or later. Apple Silicon & Intel.

Download Guignol 0.1

Signed · Notarized · ~80 MB

Or grab it from GitHub Releases. Homebrew Cask coming soon.

Read the web. Save to markdown. Hand it to your assistant.

A folder on your Mac.Yours to keep.

Highlight what matters.Summaries on demand.

Every sentence you saved,in one place.