Silica: open-source local PDF and notes search with exact citations, no LLM needed
Cryvixx · reddit · 2026-09-09
A Reddit user released Silica-core, a free MIT-licensed open-source tool for finding passages across folders of PDFs and Markdown notes.
- Returns the exact passage, filename, and page/section so you can verify it yourself — it searches rather than generates answers
- Runs entirely on your machine: no model download, API key, or cloud upload
- Usable from the terminal or connected to an assistant via MCP
- Works directly on PDFs with selectable text; scanned PDFs need a separate OCR step
- Reports unreadable files and unmatched search terms
The project is early-stage and the author is seeking feedback, especially from people with large collections of papers and documentation.
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