# Your documents, in the same search.

Earlyn can read the documents in folders you choose, such as PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Markdown files, so search, Chat and your AI tools find them next to what you saw on screen.

Nothing is read until you add a folder in Settings → Files. Earlyn then reads the text of each document, removes secrets the same way it does for the screen, stores it in the encrypted database and keeps it current: changed files are read again, deleted files are forgotten.

| Kind of file | How the text is read |
| --- | --- |
| PDF | PDFKit; scanned PDFs through on-device text recognition (first 5 pages) |
| Word, RTF, OpenDocument | macOS's own document readers |
| PowerPoint, Excel | The text parts inside the file |
| Markdown, text, CSV, JSON, HTML | As text (HTML without tags) |

## What it skips

- Hidden files and app bundles.
- Folders such as node_modules, .git, build and Library.
- Files whose name mentions a password or a secret.
- Files over 50 MB; at most 20,000 files.

## Questions

### Are my files copied?

No. Only their text is kept, encrypted, and the file stays where it is. Search results open the file or show it in Finder.

### Can Claude Code or Codex read my documents?

Yes, through Earlyn's local MCP server: document results come back from search_memory with the file path.

---
Canonical: https://www.earlyn.app/features/files · Updated 2026-10-02