Kalesh v2.1.0

Kalesh is a cross-platform Python library and numbered-menu CLI for searching PDFs offline. Six IMAP backend-development and Docker PDFs are bundled by default.

Install for development / from this project

python -m venv .venv
# macOS/Linux:
source .venv/bin/activate
# Windows PowerShell:
# .\.venv\Scripts\Activate.ps1
python -m pip install -e .
python -m kalesh

After publishing to PyPI

The distribution name is kalesh-pdf-library; the import/module name is kalesh.

python -m pip install kalesh-pdf-library
python -m kalesh

python -m kalesh works after installation. Standard Python does not automatically install a missing module when -m is used.

Menu

Main menu: 1 browse documents, 2 search all PDFs, 3 statistics, 4 rebuild index, 5 health check, 6 configure an additional PDF folder, 7 show paths, 0 exit.

Inside a document: browse pages entirely in the terminal, inspect an embedded PDF outline if available, read the full extracted text in chunks, search within the selected PDF, or export extracted text to a .txt file. Kalesh never opens an external PDF viewer.

Import from Python

import kalesh
results = kalesh.search("Docker", limit=5)
for result in results:
    print(result["document"], result["page"], result["snippet"])

Direct commands

python -m kalesh list
python -m kalesh search Docker -n 5
python -m kalesh index
python -m kalesh where

Search is local text search using pypdf; scanned PDFs without a text layer need OCR. Kalesh doesn't upload your files or queries.