Your system
Windows
Installer · .exe
DownloadRun the installer and pick where it goes. It installs for you alone — no administrator password.
Download Scibrarian
Free, and yours to run. Pick your platform — the rest of this page is only here if something surprises you.
Version 2.0.0 · released October 4, 2026 · release notes and past versions
Where your library lives
Papers, settings and any PDFs you add are written to the per-user application data directory — not into the folder the app was installed in. That directory is the thing to back up, and deleting it resets the app to a first run.
| Platform | Path |
|---|---|
| Windows | %APPDATA%\Scibrarian |
| macOS | ~/Library/Application Support/Scibrarian |
| Linux | ~/.config/Scibrarian |
Updates
The app checks for new versions on its own and installs them when you restart it. Nothing is sent anywhere to make that check beyond asking the releases page what the newest version is.
If your system warns you
Windows: “Windows protected your PC”
SmartScreen shows this for installers it has not seen often yet. Click More info, then Run anyway. The warning fades as more people install the same build.
macOS: the app will not open
Open the .dmg, drag Scibrarian to Applications, and launch
it from there rather than from the mounted disk image. If macOS still
refuses, right-click the app and choose Open, which
offers a confirm button that double-clicking does not.
Linux: the AppImage does nothing when clicked
An AppImage has to be executable — chmod +x Scibrarian-*.AppImage — and needs FUSE, which a few distributions no longer install by
default (sudo apt install libfuse2 on Debian and Ubuntu).
Running it from a terminal shows which of the two is missing.
Uninstalling
On Windows, use Add or Remove Programs; the uninstaller asks whether to take your library with it and keeps it unless you say otherwise. On macOS and Linux there is nothing to uninstall — drag the app to the Trash, or delete the AppImage — and the data directory above stays behind until you remove it yourself.
Would you rather run a server?
The desktop app is loopback-only by design: it binds to
127.0.0.1, needs no token, and cannot share a library with
anyone. If you want colleagues reading your instance, or the app running
somewhere that is awake when your laptop is not, run the server build
instead — Docker image, one command, same app.