Remember what you read

Litr keeps the text of the pages you visit, on your Mac, so you can find a page by what it said, not only by its title, and ask the assistant about things you read.

Finding a page by what it said

Type a few words in the command palette (⌘K). Below tabs, bookmarks and commands come pages you read that say those words, with the words in context, such as “…replacement boat with room for 40 cars will run twice a day…”. Every word must be in the page; the last one can be the start of a word.

Asking about what you read

In the assistant (⌥⌘A), choose Pages I've read and ask, for example "How many cars fit on the replacement ferry?" or "Hva leste jeg om GPUI-layout?". Litr finds the pages that match best and gives excerpts of them to Apple's on-device model, which answers from them and names the page. The pages it used are listed under the answer; click one to open it. You can also choose Assistant → Ask About Pages I've Read… in the View menu.

Litr looks for pages two ways and puts the results together:

• By their words, as the command palette does.
• By what they mean: "why does my browser use so much memory?" finds a page about WebKit's content processes even if it never says "browser" or "memory". macOS's own language model turns each page's opening (its title and first 800 characters) into a vector, a list of numbers for what it's about, and Litr compares those with the question's.

Asked in another language than English, the question is also translated to English, so English pages are found by it too, if macOS has the translation installed (System Settings → General → Language & Region → Translation Languages). Without it, a Norwegian question finds Norwegian pages best.

The vectors are made when you ask, for up to 100 pages read since the last question, which takes up to a couple of seconds; nothing is worked out for people who never ask. They take about 2 KB a page, and go when the page's text goes.

What's kept, and what isn't

• The readable text of a page (the article, or the visible text), up to 20,000 characters, a couple of seconds after it loads. Litr keeps the 3,000 most recent pages, a few tens of megabytes.
• Not kept: forget tabs, pages with a password field (sign-in pages), local development sites, web apps, and sites you turned it off for.
• It stays on your Mac, in Litr's database, and is never sent anywhere. The assistant and the language model run on your Mac too.

Turning it off

• For one site: View → Settings for This Site… → Remember what you read here: No. That also forgets what Litr kept from the site.
• Everywhere: Settings → Remember what you read: Off. Forget All Page Text deletes what's kept, and shows how many pages that is.
• Clearing history forgets the text too, and deleting a page from history deletes its text.