Connect your AI tools

SearchAF is also a local MCP server. That means the AI tools on your Mac can use it to find and read your files, once you have approved each one.

Why connect

Most AI tools cannot see your files at all, and the ones that can only read plain text. When one is connected to SearchAF, it can find the file you half remember by describing it, quote the text inside a screenshot or scanned PDF, and answer questions like how many invoices are in a folder. SearchAF does the finding and reading. The tool does the thinking.

Connect a tool

Open Settings with ⌘ , and choose MCP.
SearchAF lists the compatible tools it found on your Mac. Click Connect next to one and confirm. SearchAF registers itself with that tool and creates a token just for it.
Restart the tool. It now has an MCP server named searchaf and will start using it on its own.

Claude Code: Registered through its own command-line tool.
Codex: Registered through its own command-line tool.
Claude Desktop: Added to its config file. SearchAF backs the file up first and never rewrites a file it cannot parse.
Cursor: Added to its config file. SearchAF backs the file up first and never rewrites a file it cannot parse.

For anything else that speaks MCP, choose Connect another MCP client. SearchAF gives you a command to paste into that tool's MCP configuration as a stdio server named searchaf.

What a connected tool can do

Every connected tool gets the same five capabilities, and nothing more:

search: Find files by name, keyword, or meaning, with the same results you see in SearchAF.
read_document: Read the text SearchAF extracted from a file, including OCR from screenshots, PDF text, Office documents, and transcripts.
aggregate: Exact counts and group-bys, for questions like how many receipts are from March.
visual_search: Find images that look like an example image.
get_index_status: Check whether a folder is indexed and up to date before concluding a file does not exist.

Access is read-only and limited to the folders you chose in SearchAF. Each tool has its own token, and clicking Disconnect revokes it and undoes the registration.

One thing worth knowing: whatever a tool retrieves through SearchAF goes wherever that tool sends its context, usually its own AI provider, under that provider's terms. SearchAF stays on your Mac either way.