Suchi — CLI-first reference manager

Why Suchi?

⌨️

CLI-first, GUI-always

Every button in the desktop app has a CLI equivalent. 20+ commands. Pipe to jq, grep, awk. Script your research workflow.

🤖

AI-Powered Research

Chat with papers and collections via Gemini. PageIndex RAG retrieves the most relevant pages using LLM reasoning, not vector similarity.

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Your Files, Your Filesystem

No database lock-in. Your library is YAML files + PDFs in a regular folder. Sync via Google Drive. Read with any text editor.

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Zotero Connector Compatible

Install the Zotero browser extension from Chrome/Firefox store — it works with Suchi out of the box. 600+ site translators included.

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Paper Discovery

Find papers that cite yours, related work, and more by the same authors. Powered by Semantic Scholar. Click to add to your library.

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5 Metadata APIs

CrossRef, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, arXiv, and OpenLibrary. Best-in-class metadata resolution with automatic DOI discovery.

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Google Drive Sync

Sync collections to Google Drive. Share with collaborators. Per-user annotations — no merge conflicts on highlights.

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Built-in PDF Reader

Read papers without leaving the app. Dark mode for PDFs. Click in-text citations to see reference details with one click.

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Citation Export

BibTeX, CSL-JSON, RIS export. 10+ citation styles via citeproc (APA, MLA, Chicago, IEEE, Harvard, Nature, Vancouver...).

Unix Philosophy

Every feature has a CLI command. Pipe it, script it, automate it.

Adding papers

# Add by DOI, arXiv, ISBN, or URL — metadata auto-resolved

$ suchi add 10.1038/nature12373

Added: Nanometre-scale thermometry in a living cell

$ suchi add arxiv:1706.03762 --tag transformers

Added: Attention Is All You Need

# Bulk import from a PDF folder

$ find ~/Downloads -name '*.pdf' | xargs -I{} suchi add --pdf {}

Added 17 papers from PDFs (metadata extracted via GROBID)

Converse with a whole collection

# Chat with a single paper

$ suchi chat kucsko-2013 "What method did they use?"

They used NV diamond centers as nanoscale thermometers...

# Chat with an entire collection — PageIndex picks the right papers

$ suchi chat --collection "Thesis/Chapter 2"

> Which papers discuss measurement accuracy?

3 papers are most relevant:

[[Kucsko 2013]] — reports 1.8 mK accuracy on p.4

[[Neumann 2013]] — single-shot 5 mK accuracy on p.2

[[Toyli 2013]] — Allan deviation analysis on p.6

> Synthesize the methods across them

All three use NV-diamond centers but differ in...

PageIndex RAG

# Build a reasoning tree for one paper (takes ~10s)

$ suchi index kucsko-2013

Indexed: Nanometre-scale thermometry in a living cell

22 pages → 9 sections

# Or index everything in a collection at once

$ suchi index --collection "Thesis References"

Indexing 24 papers...

Done: 24 papers indexed, collection meta-index built

$ suchi index --all

Done: 415 indexed, 0 errors

Organisations & sharing

# Sign in to Google (opens browser, localhost OAuth)

$ suchi login

Signed in as you@lab.edu

# Create an organisation for your research group

$ suchi org create "Quantum Sensing Lab"

Created organisation: Quantum Sensing Lab

# Invite collaborators with different roles

$ suchi org invite "Quantum Sensing Lab" alice@lab.edu --role editor

Invited alice@lab.edu as editor

$ suchi org invite "Quantum Sensing Lab" intern@lab.edu --role viewer

Invited intern@lab.edu as viewer

# Add shared collections to the org

$ suchi org add-collection "Quantum Sensing Lab" nv-diamond

Collection 'nv-diamond' now shared with 3 members

# Share a single collection outside any org

$ suchi share thesis-committee --with supervisor@uni.edu --role editor

Shared via Google Drive

Paper discovery

# Papers that cite this one (downstream)

$ suchi cited-by kucsko-2013 --limit 5

Fluorescence thermometry via ambient light (2024) — 12 cites

Chip calorimetry for single-cell analysis (2024) — 8 cites

Nanoscale sensing in dynamic environments (2024) — 15 cites

# Related papers (semantic similarity)

$ suchi related kucsko-2013

# More papers by the same authors

$ suchi by-author "Mikhail Lukin" --limit 10

# Add a discovered paper to the same collection

$ suchi add 10.1038/nature18274 --collection nv-diamond

Search, export, automate

# Search with jq for scripting

$ suchi search "transformer" --json | jq -r '.[].title'

Attention Is All You Need

BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers

# Export a collection as BibTeX to clipboard

$ suchi export --collection thesis --format bibtex | pbcopy

Exported 47 entries to clipboard

# Backfill missing DOIs via CrossRef title search

$ suchi backfill-dois --all

Resolved 56 missing DOIs (8 → 64)

# Follow backend logs while debugging

$ suchi logs -f

Feature	Suchi	Zotero	Mendeley
Full CLI	✓ 20+ commands	✗	✗
AI Chat with Papers	✓ PageIndex RAG	✗	✗
Open Data Format	✓ YAML + PDFs	SQLite	Proprietary
Cloud Sync	✓ Google Drive	Zotero servers (300MB free)	Elsevier servers (2GB free)
Paper Discovery	✓ Citing, related, by-author	✗	✓ Limited
Browser Extension	✓ Uses Zotero Connector	✓	✓
Reference Resolution	✓ 5 APIs	✓ CrossRef + translators	✓ Limited
Open Source	✓ MIT	✓ AGPL	✗
Scriptable / Automatable	✓ CLI + REST API	Limited (JavaScript plugins)	✗

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