Ask AI questions about a local folder

How it actually works

Folder indexing and search run on your PC. Only the excerpts selected for your question join a provider request.

1. You add a folder explicitlyFrom the composer or Settings, Folder context. You give it a display name. SideNote Pro never discovers folders on its own, never crawls drives and never inspects recent files.
2. Indexing runs locallySupported files are extracted and chunked on your machine. No AI provider is called at any point during indexing. It runs asynchronously and can be cancelled from Settings.
3. You ask a questionWith the folder chip visible in the composer, your question triggers a local search over the index before anything is sent anywhere.
4. Local search picks the passagesDeterministic BM25-style lexical ranking over excerpt text and relative filenames. It gathers a wider candidate set, limits how many chunks come from any one file, and selects up to ten high-ranked excerpts that fit the remaining context window.
5. Only those excerpts are sentThe ordinary provider request carries your question plus the selected excerpts, clearly delimited as untrusted reference data. The folder itself is never uploaded.
6. The answer keeps its sourcesA Sources expander records which file, and which PDF page, each excerpt came from, with Open and Reveal actions when the file is still there.

Settings › Folder context

Lexical retrieval, not semantic search

SideNote Pro uses BM25-style lexical ranking. It matches on the words in your question against the words in your files and filenames, weighted by how distinctive those words are. It does not use embeddings, a vector database, a hosted search service, or a model-generated query.

That is a real tradeoff. Lexical search will not connect a question about staff turnover to a document that only ever says attrition. Semantic search would. In exchange you get retrieval that is deterministic, fast, requires no embedding model, involves no network call, and cannot leak your corpus to an embedding API.

What gets indexed

PDF, Word, Excel (.xlsx), PowerPoint (.pptx), saved email (.eml), TXT and Markdown files are extracted using the same pipeline as document attachments, alongside a conservative set of bounded plain-text code and configuration extensions including .json, .xml, .csv, .yaml, .md, .cs, .ts, .tsx, .js, .py, .java, .go, .rs, .sql, .html, .css, .ps1 and .sh.

Workbooks, presentations and emails joined the list in SideNote Pro 1.16. A folder indexed earlier skipped them as unsupported, and picks them up the next time you choose Refresh: nothing re-indexes a folder by itself. Indexing stays text only. A PDF with no readable text contributes nothing, because pages are read as images only when you attach a PDF to a message yourself.

Generated and vendor directories are skipped so an index of a code repository stays useful rather than drowning in dependencies: .git, .svn, .hg, .vs, .idea, node_modules, bin, obj, packages, .nuget, .gradle, dist, build, coverage and .cache. Hidden and system paths are skipped, and traversal never follows reparse points, junctions or symbolic links.

Files that are unsupported, inaccessible, malformed, encrypted, empty or oversized are isolated and reported rather than failing the whole folder. Online-only OneDrive placeholders are skipped rather than being downloaded just because a folder is indexed. Refreshing compares relative path, size and last-write time, so unchanged files are preserved, new and changed files are reparsed, and deleted files are removed from the index.

What people use it for

A code repository

Index a project folder and ask Where is authentication configured, and which files define session expiry? Retrieval pulls the configuration and the relevant source, and the Sources list tells you which files to open next. Useful on a codebase you did not write.

Product documentation

Index a folder of specifications and ask Which requirements mention offline behaviour? This is the kind of question that is tedious to answer with file search because the phrasing varies across a dozen documents.

Research notes

Index a folder of Markdown notes and PDFs and ask Find references to pricing assumptions and summarize the differences. The summary is only as good as the excerpts retrieved, which is exactly why the Sources list exists.

What retrieval does not prove

A Sources list tells you which excerpts were placed in front of the model. It does not tell you the model read them correctly, and it does not make the answer true. Retrieval narrows what the model is working from; verification is still yours to do, which is why Open and Reveal are one click away. For code and script sources, Open shows the file as text in Notepad instead of executing it.

When local search finds nothing relevant, a no-result marker goes into the request telling the model not to claim folder support for its answer. That is a deliberate guard against the failure mode where a model confidently invents a citation.

Only one configured folder attaches to a thread at a time, and it stays attached until you remove the visible composer chip. The full guide is at using AI with a local folder.