rtfm

rtfm — Read the F- Full Manual.

A local MCP server and Claude Code plugin that makes large, can't-read-by-hand technical documentation searchable — PDF spec sets, documentation repositories (and, later, public doc sites) — and answers questions strictly from that material, with grounded citations.

The eternal advice "read the manual" falls apart when the manual is a 400-page protocol spec or a vendor doc-set no human can hold in their head. rtfm ingests the full manual so the answer is one cited query away.

Limitations

rtfm indexes the extractable text a document already carries. It does not OCR images and does not execute JavaScript, so image-only/scanned PDFs and image-only or JS-rendered web pages are out of scope — they index as empty. (See ADR 0005.)

Install

# in Claude Code:
/plugin marketplace add canlin-zhang/rtfm
/plugin install rtfm

Prerequisites: python3 on PATH is the only hard requirement. If uv is installed it's used automatically (fast path); otherwise rtfm builds a private venv under ~/.rtfm/venv on first run — no manual dependency install either way. Optional: install poppler-utils (pdftotext) for best-quality PDF extraction.

Two ways to use it

Quick-and-dirty (the default drop-dir). Drop PDFs or Markdown/text into ~/.rtfm/default and just search — the default dir re-indexes itself on search, so dropped files show up with no extra step. Keep it small; it's a scratch space.

Organized corpus (pointed-to folders). For a large, structured doc set (e.g. a vendor's documentation tree), add a dir source in ~/.rtfm/manifest.toml pointing at the folder, then build it once:

reindex("vendor-docs")

Searches are instant afterward. Pointed-to sources are not indexed automatically — a search against an unbuilt source returns a warning telling you to reindex it. Byte-identical files that repeat across version subfolders are extracted once; find_duplicates lists every path a given content lives at.

Use

Drop PDFs / .md / .rst / .txt into ~/.rtfm/default/, then ask Claude to search them, or add more sources by editing ~/.rtfm/manifest.toml (see manifest.example.toml).

Or invoke the bundled read-the-manual skill (/read-the-manual) to have a question answered strictly from the corpus — verbatim quotes with page/line citations, no model-knowledge fallback.

Status

Early but working. Today rtfm gives you zero-config search over a default drop-folder: PDF, Markdown, reStructuredText, and text files are indexed into one content-addressed full-text index with page/line citations, exposed through the search / read / reindex / find_duplicates / list_sources / health_check tools and the read-the-manual skill, with a uv-or-venv launcher and Claude Code plugin packaging. HTML with anchor citations, git-backed repo sources with auto-refresh, file-curation tools, and OCR are planned — see the roadmap.

Architecture decisions live in docs/adr/; domain language in CONTEXT.md.

License

MIT © Canlin Zhang