Keep every paper you read on your own computer, and let an AI assistant do the filing.

Open a paper, highlight it, write your notes beside it — everything stays in ordinary files and folders that you can read, copy, and back up yourself, with or without litman. For anything past reading, just say what you want — add this paper, which ones did I read for the peptide project? — and your AI assistant does it.

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Install

macOS / Linux:

curl -LsSf https://get.litman.dev/install.sh | sh

Windows (PowerShell):

powershell -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -c "irm https://get.litman.dev/install.ps1 | iex"

Double-click the litman icon the installer creates — desktop on Windows, Launchpad on macOS, applications menu on Linux.

Install with pipx

pipx builds litman's environment from the Python already on your machine, so it needs Python 3.12 or newer on your PATH.

pipx install litman
lit gui --make-shortcut    # the icon — the one-line installer does this step for you

Install from a local clone (development)

# first install
git clone https://github.com/wqx1999/litman.git
cd litman
pipx install .

# update (pull latest code first)
git pull
pipx install --force .

The AI assistant

Pick an agent to drive litman through its bundled skills; you bring the model — use whatever you already pay for. Start with Claude Code.

Agent CLI	Recommended model
Claude Code	Official subscription
Codex	Official subscription
Antigravity CLI	Official subscription
Cursor	Composer 2.5
OpenCode	MiniMax-M3

Every write is validated, so a weaker model just needs more turns — it never corrupts the library. Scores and method: agent model benchmark.

Update and uninstall

Update litman

When a new release is out, a chip with its version number appears next to the logo in the Web UI. Click it and choose Update & restart: litman closes, upgrades, and reopens by itself.

From a terminal, lit self-update does the same through whichever tool installed litman, uv or pipx. It prints current → latest and asks once.

litman asks PyPI for the newest version number once a day, and mentions it when yours is older; lit hello tells you every time you ask. LITMAN_NO_UPDATE_CHECK=1 switches all of it off — what it checks.

Uninstall litman

Two steps, in order, while the lit command still exists:

lit uninstall              # bundled skills, desktop shortcut, shell completion, vault registry, agent preferences, app-window browser profile
uv tool uninstall litman   # or: pipx uninstall litman

lit uninstall lists what it will delete and asks first — --dry-run previews, -y skips the prompt. Your vault (papers, PDFs, notes, annotations) is never touched by any of this; delete that directory by hand if you want the data gone.

Documentation

Full documentation lives at litman.dev/docs. New to litman? The tutorial covers about 80% of everyday use.

• Start here — docs map
• Design philosophy
• Four-layer architecture
• Concepts and field reference
• Command reference
• Tutorial
• Agent model benchmark
• Changelog

Acknowledgments

Developed in the Süssmuth Lab, Technische Universität Berlin, with access to the TU Berlin HPC cluster.

Built with:

Standing on:

Cloud sync runs on rclone, installed separately.

The litman wordmark is adapted from Nunito.

Contact

Issues are the fastest route for a bug or a feature request. For anything else, or if you are not on GitHub: contact@litman.dev. Security problems go to the same address, privately — see SECURITY.md.

License

Copyright (C) 2026 Qingxin Wang.

litman is free software under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3 or later — see LICENSE. Use it for anything, including commercially. If you modify litman and pass it on — shipping a build, or running it where other people can reach it over a network — the modified source has to be available under the same licence.

Up to and including 1.3.4, litman was released under the MIT licence; those versions stay MIT.

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_{AI agents: a condensed, link-dense map of this project lives in README-Agent.md.}