Thinking Tools Lab

Thinking tool · Read · Understand

Tabulect

A thinking tool for reading closely and understanding what you read.

In developmentmacOSFree · MIT

Free · MIT-licensed open source · source on GitHub

  • Text to table in one keystroke

    Select a passage and press T (Tabulect): the default template turns it into a table. Or type a / instruction and ask for anything else.

  • Read in word groups

    Move through the text with ← → by word (1–5 at a time) or by meaningful phrase, and with ↑ ↓ by line or paragraph.

  • Speed-reading flow

    Press Space and the highlight advances on its own, word group by word group, at 60–900 WPM. Space again pauses exactly where you are.

  • Bookmark with Enter

    Extend the yellow highlight with Shift+arrows and press Enter. Then send all bookmarks to the AI in one go.

  • Ask for HTML too

    The answer can be a table, prose, a diagram or an HTML card, shown rendered in the HTML tab.

  • Two-pane live preview

    Source on the left, the rendered answer on the right: Preview, editable Source and HTML views that update as you edit.

See it in action

Recorded on the author's Mac with the apps' real interfaces. All AI output is real, from a signed-in CLI (Kimi or Gemini); only the time spent waiting for the model was cut.

Text to table with T. A paragraph of Bacon's “Of Studies” is selected with Shift+↓ and T is pressed. Kimi builds a table with the columns Main idea, Reasoning, Example and Practical tip in the output pane, shown next to the source, then on its own, then side by side again.
Reading in word groups, bookmarks and auto-read. Reading “Of Studies” in 3-word groups with ← and →, moving by line with ↑ and ↓, setting bookmarks with Enter, starting and stopping auto-read with Space at 220 WPM, then opening the Library with the document's bookmarks. No AI is used.
Ask anything, even for HTML. A / question about “Some books are to be tasted…” gets a bulleted answer. A second / request returns an HTML card on reading, conference and writing, rendered in the HTML tab and then shown as source.

Screenshots

Tabulect two-pane view: the essay “Of Studies” on the left with a three-word group highlighted in yellow; the empty output pane on the right.
A highlighted three-word group in the source pane.
Tabulect source pane with a passage highlighted in yellow and saved as a bookmark.
A passage bookmarked with a single Enter.
Tabulect Library panel open on the left, listing the document “Of Studies” with its two bookmarks.
The Library with the document and its bookmarks.
Tabulect output-only view showing a table with columns Main idea, Reasoning, Example and Practical tip summarising the first paragraph of “Of Studies”.
The generated table in the output-only view.
Tabulect output pane with a bulleted answer explaining books to be tasted, swallowed, and chewed and digested.
Answer to a free-form / question.
Tabulect output pane in Source view showing the HTML and CSS of the generated card.
The same HTML card shown as source.

Runs on your own AI subscription

Tabulect does not include any AI account. It talks to the official command-line tools that you install and sign in to on your own computer, using your own subscription and quota:

  • ChatGPT (Codex CLI)
  • Gemini (Google Antigravity CLI)
  • Kimi (Kimi CLI)
  • Cursor (Cursor CLI)
  • Claude (Claude Code CLI, subscription login)

Requests go from your machine to your provider under your account. Nothing uses the author's accounts, no API keys are bundled or stored, and there is no Thinking Tools Lab server in between. What you can use depends on your provider plan.

English and Turkish

Switch the interface between EN and TR at any time. The same screen in both languages:

Tabulect showing the essay and an HTML card, with the interface in English.
English interface
Tabulect showing the essay and an HTML card, with the interface in Turkish.
Turkish interface (Türkçe)

Also included

  • Opens PDF, EPUB, HTML, Markdown and DOCX; text is extracted locally, scanned PDFs can be OCR'd with free local tools you install.
  • Full-document search with context, ⌘F / Ctrl+F, ⌘G / F3 for next match.
  • Export to Markdown, HTML, PDF, DOCX and Excel.
  • Library folders, themes, custom colours, spacing and font size.
  • Never invents table rows; importing only extracts and splits the text.
Platform
macOS desktop app (Tauri 2). Current build scripts target Apple silicon Macs.
AI
On demand: reading, bookmarks, search, notes and export work without it.
License
Free · MIT-licensed open source · source on GitHub
Language
Menus in English and Turkish, with a language switch. Built-in AI prompts are in English, available in Turkish, and fully editable or replaceable with your own.
Status
In development.

The other thinking tools

Polyquill · Write · UnderstandFeedcairn · Read · UnderstandAll apps