Gorae: Your AI-Powered TUI Librarian

Gorae: A terminal-first librarian built for speed, minimalism, and flow—now with a conversational AI assistant baked right in.

📣 What’s New: Gorae’s AI co-reader has grown up — persistent chat sessions, a model that can write notes into your library (tool calling), your own slash-command skills, and optional web search. Plus Markdown notes with [[wikilinks]], navigable search that opens a PDF at the exact page, and built-in themes (:theme). Bring your own model with OpenAI or run local via Ollama. Existing users: pull the latest release.

Let’s be honest: if you are a researcher, developer, or student, your “Downloads” folder is probably a graveyard of dozens of files named 1905.1234.pdf or final_draft_v3_REAL_FINAL.pdf.

We hoard knowledge — papers, manuals, dozens of EPUBs we swear we’ll read “someday.” But managing that library is usually a painful choice between chaos (files scattered everywhere) and bloat (slow, heavy GUI apps that feel like overkill).

And there’s a bigger shift underway: with AI, you don’t just read a paper anymore—you interrogate it. The PDF stops being a static artifact and starts behaving like a colleague who happens to know this one topic very well. So a modern library tool shouldn’t just organize files. It should help you talk to them.

The TUI Librarian You’ve Been Waiting For

Gorae (고래, meaning whale) is a terminal-first librarian for your PDFs, EPUBs, and Markdown notes.

Think of it as Claude Code, but for your documents — a conversational AI partner brought to your reading desk. It’s a fast, Vim-friendly alternative to heavy citation managers like Zotero or Mendeley, with a dash of Obsidian’s linked notes and a document-aware AI assistant that lives where you already work. Think Obsidian + Zotero, in your terminal. It doesn’t try to do everything — just help you organize, find, read, and now understand your documents with minimum friction.

Why You’ll Love Swimming with Gorae

If you prefer the keyboard over the mouse, Gorae will feel immediately familiar. Here is how it streamlines your everyday reading:

⚡ Navigate at the Speed of Thought

Forget clicking through endless nested folders. Gorae offers Vim-style browsing. Fly through your library with j and k. It’s snappy, responsive, and designed to keep you in your flow state. And if you do reach for the mouse now and then, it works out of the box—scroll, click, select.

🧾 Stop Manually Typing Metadata

Bringing new papers into your library shouldn’t be a chore. Gorae automatically scans new PDFs for DOIs or arXiv identifiers and fetches the correct titles, authors, and publication years for you.

🤖 Talk to Your Library — A Document AI in Your Terminal

The heart of Gorae—and where most of this release’s work went.

This is where Gorae goes beyond a traditional library manager. Storing PDFs neatly isn’t enough anymore; the real leverage is pulling answers straight out of them. Gorae gives you a conversational reading partner that understands the documents you’ve collected.

• Chat, grounded in your library: Open a paper and just ask — “What’s the core contribution?”, “Explain Section 3 like I’m new to the field.” Answers are retrieved from your indexed documents and cited back (/sources), not hallucinated from the web.
• Summarize and save: /summarize turns a 30-page paper into a tight summary — and with tool calling on, the assistant can write it straight into your notes as Markdown. It leaves artifacts behind, not just chat.
• Persistent sessions: Conversations auto-save. Resume, fork with /new, /compact to reclaim context, or /export to Markdown.
• Skills & web search: Drop a prompt template as a .md file and it becomes a slash command like /litreview. When a question needs something outside your library, route it through Brave or Tavily.
• Bring your own model: OpenAI for top-tier quality, Ollama for fully local and offline, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Your library, your choice.

It all respects the terminal: Esc into a Vim-style navigation mode, hop between messages with j/k, yank answers with y. No web app, no browser tab, no context switch.

🔎 Find That One Quote, Instantly

Where was that specific paragraph about transformer attention mechanisms? Don’t open ten different PDFs to find it. Gorae’s full-text search indexes every document (with stemming, so running also finds run) and surfaces every hit—not just the first. Walk through the matches with n/N, then hit Enter to open the PDF right at the page where the match lives. Narrow things down with scoped flags like -a (author), -y (year), or --tag, or query your metadata directly.

🗃️ Get Organized Without the Headache

Gorae helps you tackle your reading list without complicated folder structures.

• Track Your Progress: Easily mark papers as Unread, Reading, or Read.
• Stash for Later: Use the To-Read queue to keep track of what’s next.
• Hierarchical tags: Tag a paper ml/transformers and searching the ml/ prefix pulls in the whole family—structure without folders.
• Link your thinking: Write Markdown notes with [[wikilinks]], and Gorae builds the backlinks for you—Obsidian-style. Related papers and ideas start connecting themselves.

Timeless Inspiration

The Gorae logo is inspired by the Bangudae Petroglyphs in South Korea—ancient carvings that are among the earliest known depictions of whales.

I wanted Gorae to feel like those engravings: minimal, timeless, and built to last. It doesn’t rely on flashy graphics or web engines; it’s a solid, handmade tool crafted for a specific purpose. And, just like your favorite terminal setup, it’s fully themeable—ships with built-in color themes you can switch live with :theme, or tune your own colors, glyphs, and borders to match your aesthetic.

Ready to Dive In?

Reading is no longer a one-way street — your documents can answer back, summarize themselves, and surface ideas you didn’t know they contained. A good library tool in 2026 should meet you there. Gorae is open-source and ready for you to try.

👉 Check out Gorae on GitHub to get started

Stop drowning in PDFs. Get organized, stay in the terminal, and let your library start talking back.