Search inside every document on your Mac.

What Fouine does

See the page right away

Click a result and the page appears in Fouine with your words highlighted.

Search from anywhere on your Mac

You don't need to open the Fouine window to use it. To see the rest, take the tour of the app, screen by screen.

• Menu bar Run a quick search from the Fouine icon at the top of the screen.
• Spotlight Spotlight also shows scans, DjVu files and comics, which it can't read on its own.
• Shortcuts Your shortcuts can use three Fouine actions: search, open a page and get the text of a page.
• Siri Say “Hey Siri, search Fouine”, then say what you are looking for.
• Terminal The fouine command can also search and read pages, and its JSON output works well in scripts.
• Apple Notes and Bear Your notes can be included in searches, just like your files.
• Anki Your flashcards are indexed too, and each card shows up as its own result.

Or let an AI assistant do the searching

Claude, Codex, Antigravity, Cursor, and any assistant that supports MCP

Fouine includes an MCP server, which lets an AI assistant search your documents, read the pages it finds and answer with the page numbers.

You ask the question, and the assistant does the searching and reading for you. For example:

• “Which of my lab notebooks mention nitric acid, and at what concentration?” It runs the search, reads the four pages found, and gives you each concentration with the page it is on.
• “What do my course notes say about plug-flow reactors? Which pages should I reread?” It searches with several wordings, some you might not have thought of, reads what comes back, and writes a short summary with a list of pages.
• “Do these two contracts say the same thing about the notice period?” It finds the clause in each contract and sets the two side by side, quoting both.

In my course notes, what is the difference between a plug-flow reactor and a continuous stirred-tank reactor? Cite the document and the page for each claim.

Antigravity

A CSTR assumes perfect mixing: the concentration is the same throughout the vessel and equal to the outlet concentration (Calcul de réacteurs chimiques.docx, page 6). A plug-flow reactor assumes no axial mixing, so the concentration changes continuously along the reactor (same document, pages 5 and 6). For the same final conversion the CSTR always needs the larger volume, especially at high conversion, but its yield and selectivity are often better (page 8). Several CSTRs in series behave more and more like a single plug-flow reactor (page 8).

Answers you can check

The assistant names the document and the page behind each claim, so you can open the page and read it yourself. Without Fouine, an assistant either answers from memory, and may make things up, or has to be fed whole files until it runs out of room (context window). With Fouine, on the other hand, it reads only the pages that matter, even across thousands of documents.

Setup guide, to hand to your assistant →

How the server works →

Who it's for

Fouine is for anyone who keeps more documents than they can remember. Here are six examples.

🎓 Students and academics

The exam is tomorrow and the definition you need is somewhere in 300 pages of slides. Type the term and Fouine opens the slide where it is defined, with the words highlighted.

Your Anki decks are indexed too, card by card, so one search shows the flashcard next to the course page it came from. If an AI assistant writes your cards, it can read the course through Fouine and put the page number on each one.

⚖️ Lawyers, notaries and contract managers

A notice period, a liability cap or a price-revision clause is often buried somewhere in dozens of signed contracts, most of them scans. Fouine makes those scans searchable without altering them, then opens each contract at the right clause.

You can also narrow the search to a file name, with name:"Contract 2024", or to a year. And an assistant can compare the same clause in two contracts, quoting the page of each.

📜 Historians, genealogists and archivists

Parish registers, old newspapers and archive scans add up to gigabytes of images in which Spotlight finds nothing. Fouine reads every page once, in the background, and after that you can search for a surname across all your folders at once.

Because faded ink and damaged paper make text recognition misread letters, the search tolerates small errors, so a name that came out one letter wrong still turns up.

🔬 Researchers and engineers

Your papers, theses, lab notebooks and datasheets are often spread over several projects, but one search covers them all, and every result carries its page number, ready to cite. You can also ask an assistant to compare the results of three papers, then check each figure on the page it cites.

✍️ Writers and journalists

Recorded interviews are transcribed on your Mac, so what was said can be searched like text. If you search for a phrase you remember, the result shows the minute it was said, and the player jumps to that passage.

🏠 Household papers

Scan bills, tax letters, warranties and appliance manuals into one folder without bothering to sort them. The reference number on a tax letter from three years ago will still be one search away.

Over a hundred file types

Fouine reads office files, books, email, comics, subtitles, notebooks, flashcards, source code, photos and recordings.

Old .doc, .xls and .ppt files are recognised by their contents rather than their extension, so one that has lost its name is still read. Photos go through text recognition and recordings are transcribed, both on your Mac, and you can turn either off in Settings. The full list is in the documentation.

How it compares

Here are six other ways to search a Mac, and what each one does with a box of photocopies.

Prices and capabilities checked in September 2026 on each publisher's website. “Not claimed” means the publisher doesn't advertise it, not that the app can't do it.

• Fouine doesn't organise your documents. There is no library to import them into, nothing to tag and nothing to sync, because Fouine reads your folders where they are.
• It doesn't change them. The preview is read-only, and the text recognised on a scan stays in Fouine's index.
• There is no chat and no summary. Fouine finds the words you type, not other words with the same meaning. For a written answer, connect an assistant.

Questions