Tools for people who have too much of everything.

Twenty calendars, a mailbox ten years deep, a to-do list for every part of your life and a photo library too big for any photo app. The meer* apps are a family of open-source programs, one for each of those, built for the person the defaults stopped working for. Everything lands in PostgreSQL, where you can query it. Each app stands on its own, and together they know about each other.

Meet the apps How they fit together

The apps

Four programs you can run today. Each has its own site and its own repository, and all of them are open source under the AGPL.

Calendar

meercal

A calendar for people who have too many calendars.

iCloud, CalDAV, Google and .ics feeds in one place. Its Ribbon view draws time as one continuous strip, so a three-week trip is one bar instead of three fragments, and calendar sets on the number keys switch between twenty calendars in a keystroke. Reminders land on your desktop, on your phone, or ring it.

The Ribbon Calendar sets Reminders by call

meercal.com ribalba/meercal

Mail

meerail

A mail client built for hardcore users.

Syncs any IMAP account, Proton Mail through Bridge included, into PostgreSQL in both directions, and searches all of it with regular expressions: the text inside PDF and Office attachments and scanned images too. A three-pane client with full keyboard control, and optional AI with the model of your choice, local ones included.

Regex search Attachment text Proton Mail Bridge

meerail.com ribalba/meerail

Tasks

meerato

A to-do list modeled on your life.

Buckets for every part of your life, statuses instead of deadlines, and tasks that land on today's list on the day they should. Share a task with a link, or add someone's email and they are kept in the loop without an account. Works offline and installs on your phone. Use the hosted service, or run it yourself.

Buckets Statuses, not deadlines Shared tasks

meerato.com ribalba/meerato

Photos

meerpic New

A photo manager for libraries too big for a photo app.

Made for collections of many gigabytes and tens of thousands of files, in as many folders as you keep them. It reads each file's own date and place into PostgreSQL, so everything sorts by when it was taken, sits on a map, and is found by what is in it: type cows and you get cows, with the model running on your machine. Indexing goes newest first, so last week is browsable within a minute while the rest fills in behind. iCloud Photos is one sync button away.

Multi-GB libraries Search by meaning A map of your photos

meerpic.com ribalba/meerpic

meercal's Ribbon: days run down the page without wrapping, and a long event is one unbroken bar in the rail beside them.

Better together

They are separate programs with separate databases, and none of them needs another to work. Where one knows something the next can use, it hands it over.

Invite the people you write to

Point meercal at a meerail database and the attendee field autocompletes from the people you actually correspond with, ranked by how often. Read-only: meercal never writes to your mail.

File a mail as a task

A mail that is really a job goes to meerato as a task, attachments and all, so the thing to do and the thread it came from stay together instead of living in two places.

Drag a photo into a mail

Drag a picture out of meerpic straight into a mail, meerail's or any other, and it arrives as a JPEG even when the phone wrote HEIC, so the person on the other end can actually open it.

Built the same way

Different jobs, one set of convictions. Learn one of them and the next already feels familiar.

Postgres as the store, not a cache

Mail, events, tasks and photo metadata live in a real PostgreSQL database rather than a format of the app's own. psql can answer questions no app exposes, and so can an AI tool you point at it.

Your passwords stay home

meerail, meercal and meerpic split in two: an agent that does the fetching and holds the credentials, and a web app that only reads the database. They share nothing but Postgres, so the web app has no code path that could send a password anywhere.

One filter language

Words are ANDed, and the filters are the nouns of the app. Learn it in one and you can already type it in the next.

invoice.*2024 :has-attachmentmeerail cal:family with:anna is:spanmeercal in:potsdam is:video 2024meerpic

Keyboard first

meerail, meercal and meerpic run entirely from the keyboard, with the cheat sheet on screen and generated from the same table that binds the keys, so it cannot drift from what they do.

/ j k t 1 2 3

In a browser or on the desktop

Each app is a web page first, laid out for a phone as well as a monitor, and each ships the same small Electron shell for a window of its own. Light and dark, following your system or pinned.

Open source, yours to run

All of it is AGPL and on GitHub, and the install is Docker Compose: for meerail and meercal, one script that asks what it needs and pulls the published images. meerato is also a hosted service, if you would rather not run anything at all.

Coming soon

Two more meerkats are on their way.

Professional network

meerink Coming soon

The professional network where you decide which of you is speaking.

LinkedIn's job, done by many small servers instead of one large company. One login carries several profiles: the one your employer hosts, the one you host yourself, the one for the club you volunteer at. Every post says which of them is speaking, and to whom, before you press the button.

Federated Several profiles, one login A feed order you choose

meerink.com ribalba/meerink

Writing

meerpad Coming soon

The writing tool you always wanted.

For the quick note, the long document and everything in between, in one place. It comes from the family that keeps your words in a database you can query and lets you do everything from the keyboard.

meerpad.com ribalba/meerpad