Grabbertoullie for VS Code

Search multiple book sources for a direct download link — Anna's Archive, Z-Library, Open Library, Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks, Semantic Scholar — without leaving the editor.

This extension is a thin front-end over the grabbertoullie Python CLI: it runs the search on your machine and shows the results in a panel inside VS Code.

Features

• Searches six sources in parallel and ranks the results.
• One panel, no leaving the editor — type a title, get direct links.
• Open ↗ and Copy link on every result.
• Anna's Archive links resolve to the real file on demand, not just the book's info page.

Requirements

The grabbertoullie CLI must be installed and on your PATH. It isn't published to PyPI yet, so install it straight from the repo with pipx — that puts the grabbertoullie command on your PATH in its own isolated environment, no clone or virtualenv to manage:

pipx install git+https://github.com/DevJustinTech/Grabbertoullie.git

_{(Prefer plain pip? pip install git+https://github.com/DevJustinTech/Grabbertoullie.git works too.)}

The Chromium browser that the Anna's Archive resolver drives is downloaded automatically the first time it's needed (a one-time ~150 MB download), so you don't have to run playwright install yourself — the first search just takes a little longer.

If the CLI isn't on your PATH (for example, you installed it into a specific virtualenv), point grabbertoullie.cliPath at the executable instead, for example C:\path\to\.venv\Scripts\grabbertoullie.exe.

Usage

1. Run Grabbertoullie: Search for a Book from the Command Palette (Ctrl+Shift+P). This opens a Grabbertoullie panel.
2. Type a title (optionally with an author or a pdf/epub suffix) and press Enter or Search.
3. Each result shows its source and format, with Open ↗ and Copy link buttons.

Anna's Archive results are a special case: getting the actual file link requires clearing a browser-verification challenge, which is too slow to do for every search result up front. So clicking Open/Copy link on an Anna's Archive result resolves the real file URL on demand — this can take up to ~2 minutes and may briefly show a browser window. If resolution fails, it falls back to opening Anna's Archive's mirror page instead.

Settings