readseek
readseek reads source files and PDFs for scripts, editors, and coding agents.
It returns compact JSON with stable line/hash anchors, symbol maps, parse
diagnostics, AST matches, references, and rename plans.
The screencast above was recorded with a very modest AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 4650 laptop CPU, and demonstrates the tailored inference engine for Qwen3-VL-2B.
Installation
Install the npm wrapper with a prebuilt binary:
npm install -g @jarkkojs/readseek
Or install the native program from crates.io:
cargo install readseek
Prebuilt binaries are available for macOS ARM64; Linux ARM64 and x64; and Windows x64. The Linux binaries are statically linked with musl.
To build and install from source:
make install
Plugins
Pi extension
The bundled pi-readseek extension adds ReadSeek's anchored file and structural-code tools to Pi:
pi install npm:pi-readseek
OpenCode plugin
The opencode-readseek plugin adds the same
tools to OpenCode. Add it to opencode.json:
{
"plugin": ["opencode-readseek"]
}
Vim plugin
The bundled readseek.vim plugin provides anchored reads, structural navigation,
parse diagnostics, search, references, and renames. It requires Vim9 with +job,
+channel, +timers, +popupwin, and +textprop; Neovim is not supported.
Install it with a Vim plugin manager, such as Plug 'jarkkojs/readseek', then run
:ReadSeekInstall to install the matching prebuilt binary. Downloads are explicit
by default.
Common commands
readseek detect src/main.rs
readseek read src/main.rs:10 --end 20
readseek read report.pdf --page 3
readseek view report.pdf --page 3
readseek map src/main.rs
readseek check src/main.rs
readseek symbol src/main.rs:run --name
readseek identify src/main.rs:42 --column 8
readseek def src run --language rust --format plain
readseek refs src main --language rust --format plain
readseek search src 'fn $NAME() { $$BODY }' --language rust
readseek rename src/main.rs --line 42 --column 8 --to renamed
Global options must precede the command. For example, write JSON to a file with:
readseek --output result.json detect src/main.rs
Prefix a target with stdin: to analyze an unsaved buffer while retaining a path
for language detection and cursor addressing. This works with detect, read,
map, check, symbol, and identify:
printf '%s\n' 'fn main() {}' | readseek identify stdin:scratch.rs:1 --column 4
Images and PDFs
detect reports image metadata and PDF page counts. read returns bounded base64
images by default; select local analysis with --vision-mode:
readseek read photo.jpg # default: bounded base64 image
readseek read photo.jpg --vision-mode caption # detailed natural-language caption
readseek read photo.jpg --vision-mode objects # object labels + bounding boxes
readseek read photo.jpg --vision-mode ocr # extracted text
readseek read photo.jpg --vision-mode all # caption, objects, and OCR in one pass
Vision analysis uses the low level by default. Start at low, then increase to
medium or high only when additional detail is needed:
readseek read photo.jpg --vision-mode caption --vision-level low
readseek read scan.png --vision-mode ocr --vision-level high
Set RUST_LOG=tracing to emit vision cache and inference traces on standard error.
Run cargo bench --features vision-bench --bench vision for data-driven comparisons
defined in benches/vision.txt.
Set READSEEK_VISION_THREADS to a positive integer to override Rayon's worker
count. More workers may improve throughput at the cost of CPU and memory.
PDF reads return page-tagged Markdown and embedded images. Use --page to select a
page; --vision-mode applies to each embedded image. After readseek init, view creates
or reuses a structural PDF index that can be narrowed by page, node, kind, or depth.
Line/hash suffixes, --end, --limit, and --language do not apply to visual files.
The Qwen3-VL-2B Q4_K_M model and Q8_0 multimodal projector download lazily to the user cache and are checksum-verified. Inference uses ReadSeek's built-in CPU engine and can be slow.
Cache
readseek init [path] creates .readseek/maps/ and .readseek/def-index/.
Map-dependent commands update them on demand and find .readseek/ by walking up
from the target; --readseek-dir selects one explicitly. PDF indexes and extracted
assets live in .readseek/documents/, while image analysis results are cached under
.readseek/vision/. Image cache entries are level-specific.
Documentation
For the complete CLI reference:
man ./man/man1/readseek.1
Pass --help to any command for command-specific usage.
Licensing
opencode-readseek: Apache 2.0pi-readseek: Apache 2.0readseek: LGPL 2.1+readseek.vim: Apache 2.0
Third Party Attribution
- Qwen3-VL-2B: Apache 2.0
- Downloaded on first use at run-time. The model is not distributed together with ReadSeek.
- Dwarf Seek 4: MIT
- Q4_K and Q6_K block decoding and dot-product implementation are derived works of DS4.