TextFold

🚀 New: TextFold in your browser! One click on the browser extension transfers the page you are reading to TextFold. For Chrome · Edge · Brave

English · 简体中文

Paste a link: any web page · arXiv · PubMed Central · bioRxiv · medRxiv · Wikipedia · GitHub Drop files, one or several: PDF · Word · PowerPoint · Excel · EPUB · HTML · CSV · pictures · Markdown · text Works with: Claude Code · Pi · Zotero · Obsidian · your browser

Try the demo → or download the app ↓ · What's new ↓

Read with less in your head

Choose the level of detail you need, and lower your cognitive load.

	Level	Each paragraph becomes	In whose words
1	Full	the paragraph as written	the author's
2	Brief	its one to three key sentences, verbatim	the author's
3	Key	its point and the reason for it	AI, resting on the Brief sentences
4	Takeaway	one line on the spine of its section	AI
5	Topic	a few words; the text becomes a map of section cards	AI

Also for agent output

Your agent writes more than you have time to read. A Claude Code mod folds every reply the same way, one key per level, and an extension does the same in Pi. More ↓

🚀 New feature: Works in your browser

A button for Chrome, Edge and Brave sends the page you are reading to TextFold as you see it: signed in, past a paywall you pay for, drawn by the page's scripts. The browser finds its article the way reading views do, with its headings, figures, formulas and footnotes, and TextFold folds it. With TextFold open, its reader opens beside the page. Firefox is not supported yet.

Install it from GitHub. The button is in review for the Chrome Web Store; until it is there:

1. Install TextFold 0.10.40 or later (download) and open it. It connects itself to Chrome, Edge, Brave and Chromium each time it starts. With the Python package instead: python3 -m pip install -U textfold, then python3 -m textfold capture install once.
2. Get the extension folder. Download the repository as a ZIP and unzip it, or git clone https://github.com/chenxiachan/textfold.git. The folder is ready as it is: nothing to build.
3. Load it. Open chrome://extensions (edge://extensions in Edge), turn on Developer mode, choose Load unpacked, and pick the extension folder.
4. Click it on a page. Pin the TextFold button from the extensions menu (the puzzle piece) and click it on any page. A ✓ says the page is in your library. If the browser cannot reach TextFold, the button opens a page that says what to do.

Keep the folder where it is: the browser loads the button from it. To update, download it again into the same place and click ↻ on the button's card in chrome://extensions. Once the button is in the Chrome Web Store, remove this copy before installing it from there. To see the levels, connect a model ↓.

The button reads a page only when you click it, and hands it to TextFold on this computer and to nothing else (privacy policy). docs/web-capture.md tells how it works.

One fold, three places

• Read. Paste a link, drop a file, or click TextFold's button on the page you are reading in your browser. It opens as a map of its sections that you zoom into. Get started ↓
• Fold your agent's replies. One key per level in Claude Code and in Pi, with no second model. In Claude Code and Pi ↓
• Plug it into your workflow. python3 -m textfold get hands your agent or script a document one level at a time, and an open format lets any program read and write folded text. For agents ↓

What you get

• Words that travel. As you zoom, every word that stays slides to its new place and the rest fade around it.

• Zoom under your fingers. Stop halfway, turn back, or open one paragraph alone.

• Beside the original. Open a paper's or a PDF's own pages next to the text, each paragraph shown where it stands on its page.

• Ask AI about exactly what you read. Select a passage, or ask about the whole text: the short answer comes first, and each point links to the paragraph it rests on. With Look it up on the web, an agent on your computer searches the web too.

• Notes that zoom with the text. Highlight and write in the margin; what you marked stays as you zoom out, and is saved with the page.

• Your language. Read in many languages, translated sentence by sentence, with every formula as typeset. A document's own levels are written in its own language.

• Your library, in order. Search it with ⌘K, keep documents in folders (drag one in, or right-click it), and list it by kind, by when each came in, or by when you last opened it.

Get started

Download the app for macOS (Apple silicon or Intel) or Windows. Everything it needs is inside, Python included.

Or install the Python package, on any system and for your own pipeline:

python3 -m pip install textfold
python3 -m textfold serve

Open http://localhost:3017. The first time, connect a model; then paste a link or drop a file, and pick a language. You need Python 3.9 or newer (the one macOS ships with works).

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗