What’s new in Shamela Agent

Authors in a skill. The skill editor has an Authors block beside Sections and Era. The agent searches those authors’ books first, within the skill’s sections and era.

Build with the agent, step by step. The agent now interviews you until the method is complete: what it’s for, the steps, the books with their role and edition, the sections, authors or era, and the shape of the answer.

It does what you ask. Ask the agent to quiz you and it asks one question, then checks your reply with sources. It also gives hints only, checks your answer, or keeps to the length, school or tone you ask for. A question outside Islamic knowledge gets a short answer instead of a refusal.

Scholars’ grades line up. In the grades and qira’at components, names sit in one column and long rulings are no longer squeezed.

Search by author. In Chat Scope and Project Scope, the Books tab switches to Authors. Pick authors and the agent searches their books, together with the categories and era you chose. The scope card always opens on Categories and keeps your picks.

Lighter scrolling. Scrollbars no longer redraw on every hover, so Skills and Projects scroll smoothly, and they no longer show over menus and popups.

Cover gallery. Page covers open on a gallery of 45 images in 9 groups, from illumination and geometry to architecture and the sky. Colours, your own images and uploads are in the next tab.

Automations. A new page in the sidebar for tasks the agent runs on a schedule (once, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or yearly) or when something happens. Start from 49 research templates in 12 groups, or make your own. Results arrive as a chat marked with the Automations icon, or in Space; Runs shows every run of the last 30 days.

Panels never squeeze the chat. Drag the line between the chat and Sources or the browser to resize it; the width is remembered. Opening a panel first folds the sidebar into its icon bar, and in a narrow window the sidebar opens as a drawer over the chat.

Collating manuscripts. A new Collate dialog with coloured sigla for each witness and a switch to ignore spelling differences. A variant panel lets you step through readings, adopt one or add your own, and the apparatus appears as footnotes under the text.

A cleaner look. Solid surfaces with fine lines across Skills, Projects, Settings and dialogs, calmer sidebar highlights, and notices with a clear action button. Tabs slide to the new choice.

Model and effort menus. The model menu lists your providers first and opens the models of the one you use. The effort menu shows each level’s meaning at the bottom as you move through it. Web stays solid blue while it’s on.

Titles for image-only chats. A chat that starts with only a screenshot is named from the answer, not the file name. Older ones get a proper title when you open them.

Save to Space. Saving an answer shows a tick and a notice with Open, and a second click opens the saved page instead of making a copy.

Side panel is now Side agent. The panel beside your book has a new name in the app and on the site, with the same features.

See what the agent changed. Blocks the agent edits get a soft purple mark, only where something really changed. While Space is open, the Sources panel and browser step aside.

Projects and skills. Context search, filters and @ find Arabic file names saved on Mac, the agent’s status shows file names, and the Using label opens the skill it names.

Sort and filter pages. All and Pages sort by last opened, last edited, date created or name, and filter by type, location, activity, pages that quote a book, or favourites. The AI keeps one chat for each research space.

Read while it writes. Scrolling up while an answer streams no longer pulls you back to the bottom, in the main chat, the Side agent and Space.

Manage Shamela Agent. Settings › Updates › Manage shows the installation, repairs it after five checks (closing and reopening Shamela), repairs it by itself after Shamela updates, or removes it and returns Shamela to its original state. Your chats stay on your computer.

Browser address bar. Arabic and Latin addresses and searches now run in the right direction.

No overlap with the main chat. When the main chat opens inside Shamela, the Side agent of the book behind it no longer shows through.

Choose a skill with /. Type / in the main chat or the Side agent to use one skill for this question. Otherwise the agent still picks skills by itself. Manage skills opens the Skills page.

Point a question with @. Type @ to point one question at a book, a section, a project file or another chat. The book you have open and recent ones come first. Each pick sits in the line as a coloured chip, and every chat keeps its own draft.

Trash and Undo. Deleting a chat, after you confirm, moves it to Trash with Undo, and archiving has Undo too. Settings › Privacy & data opens Archived chats and Trash, where you restore a chat or delete it for good.

Edit together. Share a page with a link to view or edit, and work on it at the same time as your supervisor or colleagues. Pages, comments and attachments are encrypted end to end, and edits made offline are sent when you reconnect.

Manuscripts. A Witnesses database, transcription with folio marks, word-by-word collation, the manuscript beside the text, a manuscript tree and an isnad chart. Read the page with AI drafts a transcription of a handwritten folio with your own AI, for you to check before it’s added.

Surveys and reviews. Forms show a question only when an earlier answer calls for it, and can be published online for respondents on any device. A PRISMA 2020 systematic review template, qualitative coding with a codebook, memos and inter-coder agreement, statistics blocks, and a bibliometrics view of the sources you cite.

The agent in the page. @Agent writes or rewrites right where you are, keeping a version of every change. Agent instructions apply to a page or a whole space, and a page can run a request daily, weekly or monthly.

More for research. Parallel translation from a book or pasted text, Harvard and MLA citations and your own CSL styles, inheritance cases where an heir dies before division and the extended kin (dhawu al-arham), and highlights and notes on scanned PDFs.

Archive and restore. Archive pages and databases out of the sidebar, undo a move, and restore from a backup.

Project chats in sections. A project chat filed in a sidebar section shows its project’s coloured icon. Click it to open the project.

Menus and scrollbars. Thin scrollbars float over the content everywhere. Menus keep clear of the window edges, never open behind a dialog, and stay with their button as you scroll.

AI in Space. Open the AI beside any page with ⌘J. It has its own chats, model, effort and Web, quotes the text you select, works on the page you mention with @, and cites its sources. AI Autofill fills database fields for you.

Inheritance, zakat and calculations. Inheritance for each of the four schools, zakat on nine kinds of wealth, and a calculator for shar‘i measures, currencies and Hijri dates. Every step names its book and page.

Check an isnad. The isnad block splits a chain, identifies each narrator from Shamela’s rijal data, and checks whether the chain connects.

Comments and supervision. Comment in the page margin, reply, resolve and reopen threads. Import your supervisor’s Word comments and tracked changes.

References and PDFs. Add a reference by pasting a DOI, ISBN or link, merge duplicates and attach the PDF. Highlight PDFs in four colours, add notes and areas, and quote from them.

Reconnect in the chat. When your Claude or ChatGPT sign-in expires, a card in the chat lets you connect again and send your question again, in the main chat, the Side agent and Space.

Steadier menus and pages. The model menu scrolls in one place, and the Skills page no longer jumps to the top when you approve, decline or switch a skill.

Space. A research workspace beside your library: spaces, a page tree, an Inbox for quick notes, Trash, and a block editor with / commands, page links and version history. Start from templates, search everything with ⌘K, and capture a note with ⌘⇧N. Everything is stored on your computer.

Quote the library live. Quotes from books, ayahs and hadith with takhrij stay tied to their book and page, with footnotes and a bibliography. Live detection finds a quotation in your library as you type. Save an agent’s answer to Space and its citations become footnotes.

Databases. Tables, boards, calendars (Gregorian or Hijri), timelines and galleries, with fields for the Islamic sciences, relations, rollups and formulas. Build dashboards and start from database templates.

Citations and export. Seven citation styles, from traditional Arabic to Chicago, APA and Malaysian university styles. Export to Word with real footnotes, Markdown or PDF, tables to CSV or Excel, and bring in your Notion pages.

Blocks for the Islamic sciences. A narrator card, a side-by-side comparison of narrations with the differences marked, a matrix of positions, and a glossary that links each term to its entry.

Main chat inside Shamela. When the main chat opens inside Shamela, it fills the whole window. The Maktabah button in the sidebar takes you back to your books.

Shamela sessions open again. Shamela’s Sessions window opens again when your history includes a Shamela Agent tab.

Stop really stops. The Stop button ends the answer at once and keeps what was written so far.

Shortcuts on an Arabic keyboard. ⌘C, ⌘V, ⌘Z, ⌘A and the other shortcuts work with the Arabic layout too. On Mac, ⇧⌘V pastes plain text.

Answers stay. An answer no longer disappears when the agent saves a note, memory or skill after writing it.

Full-screen browser. The corner button next to the panel toggle widens the browser over the chat, beside the sidebar.

Search with preview and Media. Search opens a wide window with your chats grouped by date. Hover one to read it without opening it, and rename or delete it right there. The Media tab gathers every image, file and passage you sent across your chats; click one to open its chat at that spot.

See what’s left of your plan. Settings › AI & usage (formerly AI providers) shows how much of your Claude or ChatGPT plan remains for the 5-hour session and the week, and when each resets. Checking it doesn’t use your plan.

Move the main chat from Help. The Help menu has one button to move the main chat into its own window or back into Shamela.

Its own taskbar button on Windows. When the main chat opens in its own window, Shamela Agent gets its own button and icon on the taskbar, apart from Shamela. Pin it to open the chat in one click.

A quieter sidebar. The Shamela Agent mark sits at the top and starts a new chat. Closing the sidebar leaves a slim bar of icons: search, new chat, projects, skills, chats, feedback and settings, plus the update button when one is ready.

A cleaner window. The sidebar, chat and panel now sit edge to edge with a fine line between them, and the chat area is a shade deeper in both light and dark.

Composer in narrow windows. When the sidebar and browser leave little room, the model chip shows just the model, and Effort and Web show just their icons.

Drop images from anywhere. Images dragged from Photos, Mail or a screenshot thumbnail on Mac, or from a web page on Windows, attach to your question.

Main chat opens at once inside Shamela. Going back from a book to the main chat is instant, and an answer keeps writing while you read.

Web grounding. Turn on Web in the composer and the agent can widen its research to the web: fatwas of recognised bodies, context for today and pictures, with the library still the main source. Web sources appear as grey chips and open in tabs in the Side agent. How it works.

Browser on Windows. Web sources open in tabs inside the app on Windows too, as on Mac.

Cite project files. When the agent uses your project files, it cites them with teal numbers. A number opens the page or passage in Sources with the cited lines highlighted.

Project Scope. Pick the sections, authors, books or era a project works from, and every new chat in it starts searching there. Changing the Chat Scope in the composer won’t change the Project Scope.

Project files in one place. Context opens a large view with your folders as a tree and the text the agent reads, formatted or plain.

Search project files by meaning. The agent searches other wordings of the same idea at once, and reads a passage found through another wording before relying on it.

Browser in the Side agent. Web sources open inside the Side agent, which becomes a browser with tabs. The arrow takes you back to the chat, and the compass at the top reopens your tabs, even before you ask anything.

Main chat in its own window. The main chat now opens in a window of its own, beside Shamela or on another screen. Prefer it inside Shamela? Choose that in Settings › General, or when you first start. Open in Shamela brings Shamela forward on that page. With the latest installer, the Shamela Agent app icon opens the chat directly.

Project pages. The project list opens each project on its own page, with Chats and Saved tabs, pins, and sorting by recent activity, date created, name or number of chats. Beside them: the project’s instructions, its memory, and context files (PDF, Word, images and text) the agent reads in every chat.

Shorter chat titles. Titles stay short enough to fit the sidebar, and are written by the AI you use for that chat.

Side agent settings. The Side agent has its own settings page for its Intelligent UI level and highlight quotes. General settings open in the main view.

Privacy and data. A clearer page: what stays on your computer, where your chats are saved, and archived chats.

Project files on Windows. Scanned PDFs and images are read with Windows OCR (add Arabic in Settings › Language for Arabic scans), and .doc, .rtf and .odt files are read too.

Restart to update. Restart now shows the update installing, then Shamela closes and reopens by itself on Windows and Mac. A note confirms the update when it opens.

Skills. Research methods the agent follows: the steps, a reading plan of books, and the sections and era it searches first. Six are built in.

Three ways to make one. Build it with the agent in a chat, write it yourself, or upload a .md or .zip file.

Choose the edition. For a book with several editions, pick the one the agent uses in that skill.

It learns new skills as it researches with you, and improves the ones it made. You can turn this off.

Memory. The agent remembers how you like it to work and the corrections you make. Edit, mute or delete them in Personalisation.

Your instructions. Standing instructions for every chat. They never override citations or the search scope.

About you. Madhhab, level, answer style and interests, set by you or learned by the agent.

Your library. The sections, books and era you prefer come first in search results. Each shows whether you or the agent set it.

Danger zone. Clear what it learned, or erase all personalisation.

Send feedback. The bug button at the bottom of the sidebar reports a bug or suggests an idea, and links to contact, questions and what’s new. Settings has a new Shamela Agent group: About, Updates, Help, Report a problem, and Privacy & data.

Welcome tour. On first open: language, how it works, connecting Claude or ChatGPT, and a little about you.

New Mac installer. A window that checks your Mac and installs step by step, in a disk image with the Open Anyway step built in.

Skill proposals. Methods the agent learns now wait for your approval. Choose Auto, Every study or Off.

Suggestions from your reading. Sections, books and era it notices can be added in one click or dismissed for good.

Settings: General comes first, Intelligent UI has its own tab, and Accounts is now AI providers.

Menus open and close on a second click, stay with their button when you scroll, and work with the keyboard.

New switches and fields, and wider settings cards.

Smoother pages. Skills opens and scrolls without stutter, New chat and Back to chats close every page, and dark mode is a little darker.

Intelligent UI. Answers can show tables, cards, chains of narration, calculators and quizzes.

Four levels. Choose how much it shows in Settings, with a separate level for the Side agent.

Pictures. Book pages and covers from Shamela’s scans, and labelled illustrations from Wikipedia.

Depth follows effort. Higher effort reads more books and explains in more detail, from a short answer at Low to the fullest study at Max.

Pictures open large. Pictures start small; click one to enlarge it, then zoom in and out or drag it.

Photographs of modern scholars from Wikipedia, never images of prophets, companions or earlier figures.

A setting to open the sources panel automatically when an answer finishes.

Rename from the top bar. Click a chat’s title to rename it.

Several chats at once. Ask in another chat while one is still answering; any number can run together.

Read receipts. Hover a question to see when you sent it: one tick when sent, two once Claude or ChatGPT starts answering.

Your own API key. Connect with a Claude or OpenAI API key instead of a plan.

The Side agent has three levels (Off, Light, Balanced) to keep it uncluttered.

Choose a source from the sources menu; the previous and next arrows are gone.

Quotations use a neutral colour.

The live dot and the ⋯ button keep one column in the chat list, whatever the title’s language.

Shared answers keep their tables and cards.

The effort meter’s needle points to each level, with its own colour at Max.

A picture is shown only when it matches the subject exactly, never a loosely related one.

Reference markers no longer appear inside calculators and unit converters.

The sources panel stays open, on the same page, when the chat refreshes.

Windows: sharing works even when secure connections fail inside Shamela.

Closing a book tab no longer closes the AI view.

Windows: updates install even when secure connections fail inside Shamela.

Arabic titles in the English interface (and English ones in the Arabic interface) keep their arrows and icons at the end of the text.

Text you highlight in a book is quoted in the Side agent.

Share links. Share an answer as a link anyone can open.

One Connect button. Installs the official Claude or ChatGPT tool and signs you in.

Windows support. Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit.

Automatic updates. Restart Shamela when the blue button appears.

After you highlight text, the cursor is already in the question box, so you can type straight away.

A tidier header: click the title for past chats, and an arrow moves the panel to the other side of the tab.

Messages no longer show through the question box when they scroll behind it.

Limit a search to categories, authors, books or an era.

Projects and sections to keep chats in order.

Attach files to a question.

Side agent in book tabs. Ask about the book you’re reading without leaving it.

Settings and the Mac installer.

Answers cite the book, volume and page, with a sources panel and follow-up questions.

Works with Claude and ChatGPT.

First preview. The AI view inside Shamela.