Folder Scholar

Folder Scholar is an Electron desktop app that scans a local directory, extracts text from common document formats, and lets you chat with a local Ollama model about the contents of those files.

Recommended Naming

• Project name: Folder Scholar
• Repository name: folder-scholar

This keeps the product name readable while using a clean, standard git repository slug.

What It Does

• Scans a local folder recursively.
• Extracts text from pdf, csv, tsv, txt, md, json, html, xml, docx, xlsx, yaml, yml, and log files.
• Chunks the extracted text locally for retrieval.
• Uses Ollama for local chat generation.
• Uses semantic retrieval when an embedding model is available, and falls back to keyword retrieval when it is not.

Quick Start

1. Install dependencies:

npm install

2. Make sure Ollama is installed and running locally.

3. Pull a chat model and an embedding model. For example:

ollama pull qwen3:4b
ollama pull nomic-embed-text

4. Start the desktop app:

npm start

5. Use the Quick Installs panel to pull the recommended Ollama models from inside the app:

• gemma4:e4b
• gemma4:26b
• nomic-embed-text

Notes

• Large files over 25 MB are skipped to keep the desktop app responsive.
• Very large folders are capped at 6,000 indexed chunks.
• If your embedding model is missing, scanning still works and chat uses keyword retrieval instead.
• Legacy binary Office formats such as xls are not supported in this version.
• The bundled launcher clears ELECTRON_RUN_AS_NODE before startup, which helps on shells where Electron has been forced into plain Node mode.

Smoke Test

Run the small parser and chunking smoke test with:

npm run smoke

Build Desktop Installers

Build desktop artifacts with:

npm run dist:win
npm run dist:linux
npm run dist:mac

Build everything supported by the current host with:

npm run dist:all

Notes:

• On Windows, dist:all builds Windows plus a Linux tar.gz package.
• On macOS, dist:all can build macOS directly and can build additional targets depending on your signing/toolchain setup.
• macOS artifacts require a macOS host, per electron-builder's platform limitations.
• For full cross-platform packaging, use the Desktop Packages GitHub Actions workflow in .github/workflows/desktop-packages.yml. It builds Windows on Windows, macOS on macOS, and Linux on Linux, so the Linux job can produce AppImage, deb, rpm, and tar.gz.
• The workflow can be started manually from the GitHub Actions tab or automatically by pushing a version tag such as v0.1.0.