Semlith Files

Keeps a store current while you work: files are re-embedded as they are saved, and an agent already connected over MCP sees the change without restarting.

Added

• semlith watch [PATHS...]. Stays running and re-embeds files as they are saved, so semlith index stops being something you have to remember.

sh semlith watch ~/notes ./src

It begins with the same incremental pass index runs — so whatever changed while nothing was watching is caught up — and then waits on filesystem events rather than polling. Measured on a 1000-file corpus: no measurable CPU over a 60-second idle window, and about a second from a save to that text being searchable.

New files are indexed, deleted files lose their chunks and vectors, and a rename moves the file rather than duplicating it. An editor that saves by writing a temp file and renaming it over the original is treated as an edit, not as a deletion followed by a new file. Ignore rules come from the same walk index uses, so .gitignore, hidden files and the store's own directory are skipped by construction rather than by a second set of rules.

Events are batched until things go quiet for --debounce milliseconds (500 by default), so one save — or a formatter rewriting a file three times — costs one re-embed and one index write.

• A long-running reader now sees another process's writes. The store counts index rewrites, and a search reloads the vector index when that count has moved. In practice: run semlith watch beside your agent's semlith mcp server, and the agent's answers track your working tree with nothing restarted. The check is one SQLite read per search.

• Ctrl-C stops a watcher cleanly. SIGINT and SIGTERM end it at a batch boundary, so index.tv is written whole or not at all and no temp index is left behind. A second signal kills it outright. Unix only; on Windows the default terminate-immediately behaviour applies.

Changed

• semlith watch holds the store's write lock for as long as it runs. A store has one writer, so semlith index against a watched store exits non-zero and names the watcher's process. Searching is unaffected.
• An indexing pass that changes nothing no longer rewrites index.tv.

Compatibility

No schema change and no index format change. A 0.3.0 store is watched without re-indexing, and a store written by 0.4.0 opens, searches and indexes under 0.3.0 — both verified against the 0.3.0 release binary. The only addition to the store is one row in the existing meta table.

Install

Download the archive for your platform, unpack it, and put semlith on your PATH. Linux builds need OpenBLAS at runtime (apt-get install libopenblas-dev or your distribution's equivalent). Intel macOS has no prebuilt binary: ONNX Runtime no longer publishes x86_64 macOS builds.

Verify a download against SHA256SUMS before running it.