margin

margin is a desktop PDF reader with AI built in. Designed with research papers in mind, but it handles any PDF you throw at it.

• Fast, searchable library. Drop in PDFs or arXiv links and find anything instantly.
• Ask questions in context. Highlight text, equations, tables, or figures and chat about them right there in the paper.
• Bring your own AI. Works with any OpenAI-compatible API, or with your favorite coding agent like Codex, Claude Code, and Antigravity. You pick the model and provider. No lock-in.
• Local-first and private. Your chats, PDFs, and app data stay on your machine. No tracking, no subscription, no account to create. Remote AI providers only receive the content needed for your request, per their privacy policy.

Add a paper from an arXiv link, ELI12 any passage, or select a formula and just ask.

npm install
npm run dev

Data lives in ./data (override with MARGIN_DATA_DIR). It's a plain SQLite DB you can inspect with sqlite3 data/margin.db.

• npm run dev: start with hot reload
• npm run build: build all bundles to out/
• npm run dist: build a native installer for the current platform to release/
• npm test: vitest unit tests (selection, prompt assembly, tag parsing, math normalization)

See Shortcuts.