Surf

Surf combines an AI notebook with web browsing for people researching across websites, videos and documents. It runs on macOS, Windows and Linux and keeps your library on your device in open formats. You can collect source material, ask questions about it and write notes in the same workspace.

Its AI can draw on websites, YouTube videos, PDFs and images, including material you've saved in your library. Notes can include web search results and citations that point to a specific webpage section, video timestamp or PDF page. That gives you a way to check an answer against the material it came from without hunting through the whole source.

Notebooks hold files, links, images and your own writing. Tabs and split view let you read sources beside your notes, while the editor supports tables, code blocks and to-do lists. You can open and use much of your saved library offline; web searches and cloud models need an internet connection.

You choose the AI backend. Surf supports local LLMs as well as cloud models using your own API key, so local data storage doesn't mean every AI request stays on your machine. The project is open source under Apache 2.0, and you can import, export and manage your stored data.

For research that benefits from interaction, Surflets generate small apps and graphs without requiring you to write code. These applets can help you explore concepts or data within the notebook.