Ambiance

Ambiance

Semantic search for documents and code on macOS.

Download for macOS

Version 1.23.0

Ambiance search window

Features

Semantic Search

Find documents by meaning, not just keywords. A trained byte-level transformer encoder maps your query and documents into a shared embedding space for cosine similarity search via HNSW.

Text & Regex Search

Switch between semantic, case-insensitive text, and POSIX extended regex modes with a single click. Find exact phrases or complex patterns across all indexed files.

Per-Directory Tabs

Each directory gets its own tab with an independent search index. Drag to reorder, see the Git branch and chunk count at a glance. Restored on relaunch.

Train Your Own Encoder

Create training profiles for different languages or domains. Point at directories of documents, click train, and get a domain-tuned encoder on Apple Silicon.

Native PDF Support

PDFs are extracted natively via Apple PDFKit — no Homebrew, no pdftotext, no external tools. Hover preview shows PDFs in an in-app viewer at the correct page.

Pinned Results

Pin important results to the top of the list. Pinned results persist across searches and app restarts, making it easy to curate reference material per directory.

RAG Prompt Builder

Format search results as a context-enriched prompt for ChatGPT or Claude. Choose pinned, top 5, or all visible results, click Copy Prompt, and paste into your LLM.

Rope Integration

Double-click a source code result to open it in Rope at the exact line via the rope:// URL scheme. Hover over any result to preview the full file, PDF, or rendered HTML in a resizable panel.

Hover Preview

Hover over any search result to preview the full file in a resizable panel. Text files show mode-aware highlighting, PDFs render at the correct page, and HTML files are displayed in a web view.

How It Works

  1. Train an encoder — Point the trainer at your documents to learn domain-specific patterns. Swedish documents? English research papers? Train a profile for each.
  2. Open a directory — Ambiance indexes all text files, source code, and PDFs into overlapping chunks stored in a local HNSW index. Two-stage retrieval narrows by file first, then by chunk.
  3. Search — Type a natural language query for semantic search, an exact phrase for text search, or a pattern for regex. Results show file, line, score, and snippet.
  4. Use results — Hover to preview files in-app. Double-click to open in Rope or Preview. Pin important findings. Copy results as a RAG prompt for your favourite LLM.

Keyboard Shortcuts

⌘⇧O
Open Directory
⌘W
Close Tab
⌘⇧R
Re-index
⌘I
File Scope
⌘⇧C
Copy Prompt
⌘,
Settings
⌘?
Help
Return
Search

Requirements

  • macOS 26 (Tahoe) or later
  • Apple Silicon recommended for training
  • Rope (optional, for source code navigation)