Recording

Starting, stopping, and pausing the daemon, checking status, and the lifecycle of stored data.

Recording runs as a background daemon (a launchd agent), controlled with these commands:

Command	Effect
`zanei start`	Register with launchd and start background recording
`zanei stop`	Stop recording and unregister from launchd; stored data is kept
`zanei pause --for 30m`	Pause; without `--for`, pauses indefinitely until `resume`
`zanei resume`	Resume from pause
`zanei status`	Check daemon state, event counts, and store info

Starting

zanei start

On startup, permissions are checked. If any are missing, recording does not start and the command exits with code 3 explaining what to grant (see the permissions guide).

Running in the foreground

Two ways to observe what’s happening without daemonizing:

zanei start --foreground   # same configuration as the daemon, in the foreground (dev/debug)
zanei record --stream      # stream raw events as NDJSON to stdout

record is for piping and experimentation; use --out events.jsonl to write to a file. For everyday recording, use start.

Checking status

zanei status
zanei status --json   # for agents and scripts

{
  "running": true,
  "paused": false,
  "since": "2026-08-16T08:00:00Z",
  "uptime_s": 3600,
  "events_captured": 12345,
  "last_event_ts": "2026-08-16T08:59:58Z",
  "store": { "path": "~/.local/state/zanei/store.sqlite", "size_bytes": 5242880, "retention_hours": 48, "oldest_event_ts": "2026-08-14T09:00:00Z" },
  "capture": { "sources": ["app", "window", "ui", "input", "browser"], "text_content": false },
  "permissions_ok": true
}

When there is no daemon to act on (status, stop, etc.), the exit code is 4.

Pausing and resuming

pause turns recording off temporarily, for example during a meeting or a screen share:

zanei pause --for 30m   # resumes automatically after 30 minutes
zanei pause             # paused until you resume
zanei resume

Data lifecycle

Data lives only in the local SQLite store at ~/.local/state/zanei/store.sqlite (override with --store).
Events older than 48 hours are purged at startup and periodically, and are excluded from reads (retention_hours, see configuration).
To delete manually, use purge:

zanei purge --before 24h   # delete events older than 24 hours
zanei purge --all          # delete everything (with a confirmation prompt)