What is Scholardo?
Scholardo is a native macOS research workspace that treats AI agents as first-class citizens.
Most reference managers are built for a single researcher. Scholardo is built for two: you and your agent share the same library, the same annotations, and live reading context — natively, not through a plugin.
How it's different
| Tool | Stores refs | Reads what you're reading | Agent can annotate / search / cite |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zotero / Mendeley | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Notion / Obsidian | ✓ | ✗ | Partial (plugin) |
| Scholardo | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ (40+ MCP tools) |
Core principles
- Agent-native — A built-in MCP server lets any MCP-compatible agent (Claude Code, Codex CLI, etc.) call search, retrieve, annotate, cite, and more directly.
- Local-first — All data lives in
~/.scholardo/on your machine. Zero telemetry, zero account for local use. - Hybrid search — FTS5 lexical + dense embedding fusion (RRF). Finds concepts, not just keywords.
- Unified annotations — One model for PDF, EPUB, HTML, MHTML. Annotations follow the file by content SHA.
What Scholardo is not
- It is not a cloud note-taking app. There is no sync server.
- It is not a chat interface. The agent lives in your terminal; Scholardo is the library it reads from.
- It is not a replacement for your writing tool. It is the research substrate underneath it.