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Concepts

A short tour of the model behind Tome. Everything else in the docs builds on these terms.

Catalog​

A catalog is a git repository of plugins. You add a catalog by pointing Tome at its repo; Tome clones it, parses every plugin it contains, and indexes the entries for search. Catalogs are the unit of distribution — sharing your work means publishing a catalog and telling people to add it.

tome catalog add <repo>

Plugin​

A plugin is a bundle of capabilities inside a catalog, described by a plugin.json manifest. Plugins are enabled or disabled individually. Enabling a plugin makes its entries available to your harnesses and to search.

tome plugin enable <name>

Entry kinds​

A plugin contributes four kinds of entry:

  • Skill — a unit of knowledge or procedure (SKILL.md with frontmatter). The primary thing semantic search retrieves.
  • Command — a user-invocable action, exposed as a slash command in supporting harnesses and as an MCP prompt.
  • Agent — a persona with its own system prompt, translated to each harness's native agent format (where supported).
  • Hook — an event-driven action wired into the harness (for example, real Claude Code hooks).

Workspace​

A workspace is a per-project scope. Different workspaces can enable different catalogs and plugins, and a workspace can be bound to one or more project directories so the right composition is active for the right project.

tome workspace use <name>

Harness​

A harness is a coding agent that Tome targets: Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI, or OpenCode. Running tome harness use <name> writes that harness's native configuration — rules file, MCP server wiring, and native agents/hooks where the harness supports them.

The central index​

Tome maintains a single local SQLite index (with a vector extension for semantic search) under ~/.tome/. Adding a catalog or enabling a plugin updates this index. It powers both tome query and the MCP server's search. The index, the embedding model, and the reranker all stay on your machine — there is no telemetry.

MCP server​

tome mcp runs Tome as an MCP server. It exposes search and skill-loading tools (search_skills, get_skill, get_skill_info) plus user-invocable entries as MCP prompts, so an agent can find and load only the skills it needs at runtime rather than holding everything in context. See the MCP server page for wiring.