Deta Surf

Most applications handle one media type well, notes or web pages or PDFs, and leave you shuttling between windows. Deta Surf is an AI notebook that pulls your files and the web into the same stream of thought, cutting out the searching, tab juggling and copy-pasting that research usually involves.

Data stays on your machine in open formats, held by a local storage engine the project calls SFFS. Surf is built in Svelte, TypeScript and Rust, runs on macOS, Windows and Linux, and works with whatever language model you point it at, a cloud model with your own key or a local one.

Several features build on that private library.

• Notebooks: local files, websites, YouTube videos and tweets are stored and organized, much of it usable offline.
• Smart notes: any tab or library item can be mentioned inline, with citations deep-linked to a page section, a video timestamp or a PDF page.
• Web search: research results come back into the note you are already writing.
• Surflets: interactive applets are generated from a prompt to visualize data or explore a concept.
• Tabs and split view: notes, files and web pages open side by side, with a sidebar for navigation.

Installers are documented in the repository, and building from source is covered by the contributing guide. The source is under Apache 2.0 with one exception noted in the license section. Surf suits people who want their reading, their notes and their AI in one window, without any of it leaving the machine unless they choose.