Study Tool

🚧 Work in progress — actively being developed. Features and UI may change. Contributions and feedback welcome!

A minimal, distraction-free tool for studying papers and learning new concepts — powered by LLMs.

Unlike ChatGPT's linear chat, this tool lets you branch into any part of a response, explore it deeply, and come back. Think of it as a personal tutor with a tree-shaped memory.

recording.mp4

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Why This Exists

Reading a dense paper or learning a new topic with ChatGPT is frustrating. You read a long response, want to dig into paragraph 3, but you're stuck appending to the end of a linear thread. By the time you circle back to paragraph 5, the context is gone.

This tool fixes that. Every conversation is a tree, not a list.

Features

Branch from any text

Select any part of an AI response and branch into it. The LLM keeps full context of the conversation up to that point. When you're done, jump back to the branch point and explore something else.

Upload PDFs

Drop a paper in and start asking questions. The full text is extracted and sent to the LLM as context — no copy-pasting needed.

Mark what you've read

Hover over any paragraph and mark it as read. Build up a map of what you've actually internalized.

Knowledge map

Everything you've marked as read is organized by the LLM into a structured knowledge view — grouped by topic, with key concepts and connections.

Branch navigation

• Highlighted segments show where you've branched from, with clickable links to jump to each branch
• "Back to branch point" scrolls you back to where a branch originated
• Tree sidebar shows the full structure of your conversation
• Breadcrumbs show your current path

Merge branches

Select multiple branch endpoints and merge them. The LLM synthesizes insights from all branches into a coherent summary.

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Quick Start

# Clone
git clone https://github.com/landywei/study-tool.git
cd study-tool

# Install
npm install

# Configure
echo "OPENROUTER_API_KEY=your-key-here" > server/.env
echo "PORT=3001" >> server/.env

# Run
npm run dev

Open http://localhost:5173.

You'll need an OpenRouter API key. Any model works.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
Enter	Send message
Shift+Enter	New line
Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+N	New conversation
Cmd/Ctrl+B	Toggle sidebar
Escape	Close dialog / clear selection

Tech Stack

Frontend	React, TypeScript, Vite, Tailwind CSS, Zustand
Backend	Node.js, Express, TypeScript
Database	SQLite (better-sqlite3)
LLM	OpenRouter (any model)
PDF	pdf-parse for text extraction

Everything runs locally. No accounts, no cloud, no telemetry.