📚 Charly

A simple, folder-based home for your research papers, books, and PDFs — a lightweight, local-first alternative to Zotero.

Charly points at a folder you choose. The folders and files you see in the app are the real folders and files on disk — there's no hidden database to corrupt or lock you in. Put that folder in iCloud Drive, Dropbox, or Google Drive and your whole library syncs across devices for free.

Features (MVP)

• Pick a library folder — anywhere on disk, including a synced cloud folder.
• Folder-tree sidebar — browse your library exactly as it's organized on disk.
• Import PDFs and EPUBs into any folder (files are copied in; originals untouched).
• Organize — create folders/subfolders, rename, and move items to Trash.
• Read in-app — built-in PDF viewer (zoom) and EPUB reader (paginated).
• Search — instant filename search across the whole library.

Tech stack

• Tauri 2 (Rust) — native desktop shell, filesystem access
• React 19 + TypeScript + Vite — UI
• pdf.js — PDF rendering
• epub.js — EPUB rendering

Develop

npm install
npm run tauri dev      # run the app in development
npm run tauri build    # produce a distributable app bundle

Requires Node.js and a Rust toolchain (rustup).

How it works

The library root is stored in the app config dir (config.json). All other state lives on the filesystem itself — your folder structure is the source of truth. Sync is delegated to whatever cloud provider syncs the chosen folder.

Browser extension — Clip to Charly

Charly ships with a browser extension that saves the page you're reading, or any link, straight into a folder of your library. PDFs download as real files; web pages and videos are saved as portable .charlylink sidecar files.

While Charly is running it exposes a localhost-only endpoint (127.0.0.1:8765) that the extension talks to — nothing leaves your machine. See extension/README.md for install and usage.

Roadmap

See ROADMAP.md. Highlights:

• Metadata extraction (title/author/DOI) + full-text search
• Drag-and-drop organizing
• Tags & smart collections
• ✅ Browser extension: capture the page/link currently on screen
• YouTube capture: extract studies/citations referenced in a video

License

MIT