TeacherPro 🎓

TeacherPro is a local-first, privacy-focused desktop application designed specifically for educators, tutors, and teachers. It tightly integrates a rich-text lesson plan editor, a weekly calendar for scheduling, material/file management, and interactive mindmapping into one seamless workspace.

Built with performance and cross-platform compatibility in mind using Tauri, React, Tailwind CSS, and Rust.

Product Tour

A quick visual walkthrough of TeacherPro — from planning and editing to mindmapping and pedagogy.

Plan & Schedule
Weekly Planner See your whole week at a glance. Each lesson card shows its subject with a colour-coded left accent. Drag cards between day columns to reschedule, or bulk-select and move to Trash.	Lesson Plan Editor Structured rich-text editor with a metadata row (teacher, date, subject) and a built-in pedagogy table tracking Time, Phase, Learning Activity, Social Form, and Media. Full formatting toolbar on the right.
Think & Explore
Mindmap Workspace Build connected ideas on an infinite canvas. Right-click any node to rename it, link new child nodes, apply a preset colour, or pick a custom one. Drop material files onto the canvas to create linked file nodes.	Method Bank Browse a searchable library of teaching phases, social forms, and pedagogical methods in a slide-out left dock. Filter by Phase, Social, or Method tags and double-click any entry to insert it directly into your active lesson table row.

---

✨ Features & Settings Guide

TeacherPro is packed with purpose-built tools designed to adapt to your teaching workflow. Here is a breakdown of what you can do:

🗂️ The Vault System (Local-First)

• 100% Local Storage: First, you select a "Vault" folder anywhere on your computer. TeacherPro saves all your lessons, mindmaps, and materials directly into this folder. No cloud accounts, no sync issues.
• Portability: Everything is saved as lightweight .json files. You can safely back up your Vault to a USB drive or cloud folder (like Google Drive or Dropbox) without breaking the app.
• Smart Breadcrumbs: The top navigation bar intelligently displays your exact location relative to your Vault.

📝 Lesson Plan Editor

• Rich Text Formatting: Powered by TipTap, the editor supports Headings, Bold, Italic, Strikethrough, Underline, Unordered/Ordered lists, text color, underline color, and multicolor highlighting.
• Specialized Lesson Tables: Insert pre-formatted pedagogy tables tracking Time, Phase, LTA (Learning/Teaching Activity), Social Form, and Media. You can dynamically add/remove rows and columns, resize them freely, and set the default inserted body-row count in Settings.
• Metadata Management: Easily track the Teacher Name, Creation Date, and use a built-in calendar popup to set the Planned Date.
• Autosave + Manual Save: Changes are automatically saved in the background, and you can still trigger a manual save anytime.
• Contextual AI Chat Dock: Toggle AI chat directly from the editor action buttons; when active, it opens as a slide-out side dock so it remains visible while you work.
• Private Lesson Notes Drawer: Open a dedicated notes panel per lesson from the editor header action row (right next to AI Chat). It uses the same left-side dock area as AI Chat, with only one panel open at a time. Notes autosave with the lesson, are searchable locally, and stay out of print/PDF export by default.
• Method Bank Pedagogy Drawer: Open a third optional dock panel from the same lesson action row to browse teaching phases, social forms, and methods. It shares the same left-side dock footprint as AI Chat and Notes, stays mutually exclusive with them, supports double-click insertion into mapped lesson-table columns when the cursor is inside a lesson-table body row, and supports contextual / suggestions inside table cells.
• Stable Editor Button Order: The dock toggles in the lesson action row stay ordered as AI Chat (leftmost), then Notes, then Method Bank.
• Readable Workspace Density: The main sidebar and all lesson side docks are slightly wider, while surrounding workspace padding is reduced to maximize useful space without shrinking core editor or mindmap surfaces.
• Material Linking: Double-click a material entry in the sidebar to insert a clickable media link into the lesson table's media column for the active row (when cursor focus is inside a lesson-table body row). Double-clicking an inserted link opens the file in your computer's default native application.

🧠 Mindmap Editor

• Infinite Canvas: Build visual curriculums using a node-based interface (powered by React Flow).
• Drag-and-Drop Connectivity: Create nodes, double-click to rename them, and drag connections between them to map out concepts.
• Color Workflow: Right-click any standard node to apply fast preset colors or use a custom color picker; text and border contrast are auto-adjusted for readability.
• Material Nodes: You can drag and drop external files directly onto the mindmap surface to create dedicated file nodes.
• Context Menus: Right-click anywhere on the canvas or on specific nodes to access quick-actions (Delete, Add Node).

📅 Weekly Calendar View

• Visual Scheduling: See your upcoming week at a glance.
• Quick Reset to Current Week: Use the built-in Today button to jump back instantly after browsing future/past weeks.
• Easy Access: Click on any scheduled lesson directly from the calendar to instantly open it in the editor.
• Drag to Reschedule: Drag a lesson card to another day column to move it. TeacherPro updates the lesson's planned date and file date so it appears under the new day immediately.

🧭 Sidebar Productivity Tools

• Unified Smart Search: Open one collapsible search block in the sidebar and filter Lesson Plans, Mindmaps, Materials, and Trash from a single query (including indexed document content for lessons/mindmaps).
• Material Search: Find copied/imported materials quickly by file name or nested relative path.
• Duplicate Plan: Right-click any lesson and duplicate it for recurring classes.
• Safe Deletion + Recovery: Deleted lessons/mindmaps/materials are moved to the Vault's Trash folder, where you can restore items later or permanently delete them.
• Rendered Trash Preview: Lesson plans and mindmaps inside Trash can be previewed in rendered form (not raw JSON) before restoring.
• Centered Settings Workspace: Settings now open in a dedicated centered modal with clearer spacing, professional section tabs, and ESC/backdrop close behavior.

🖨️ Native Printing & PDF Export

• Flawless UI Capture: TeacherPro uses a custom canvas engine to perfectly capture the exact colors, table borders, and layouts of your lesson plans and mindmaps—ensuring your printed sheets look exactly like your screen.
• Native OS Print Dialogs: Built with a custom Rust backend, clicking "Print" seamlessly opens the native Windows, macOS, or Linux print dialogs, avoiding standard webview limitations.
• Export to PDF: Save beautifully formatted PDF versions of your documents directly into your Vault's Exports folder.

⚙️ UI & Customization

• Accent Colors: Personalize your workspace! The default theme is a deeper TeacherPro blue (#2d86a5) for better in-app readability, and you can still change the accent color to match your preference.
• Custom Accent Picker: In addition to presets, you can choose any custom accent color directly from the settings color picker.
• Dark Mode Focus: TeacherPro now runs with a dark app shell for consistent readability and reduced visual drift across screens.
• Independent Paper Tones: Set Lesson Plan paper and Mindmap paper to White or Dark independently from the global app theme.
• Viewport-Safe Context Menus: Right-click menus in sidebar, editor tables, mindmaps, and material links auto-reposition near window edges so actions remain fully visible.
• Stable Scrolling Layout: Scrollbar gutters are stabilized to avoid content width shifts while scrolling; scrollbar visuals are slimmer and neutral gray.
• Collapsible Sidebar: Keep your workspace clean by collapsing the sidebar and individual sections (Lesson Plans, Mindmaps, Materials).
• Persistent Sidebar Setup: Sidebar open/collapsed state, Sidebar Search collapse state, and expanded Material/Trash folders now restore after restarting the app.
• Centered Main Welcome Screen: When no lesson is open, the main content area shows a simple centered welcome with shortcut hints instead of an immediate create button.
• Keyboard Shortcuts: Cmd/Ctrl+S saves the active lesson in the editor; Esc closes preview overlays, settings, and editor side panels (AI Chat, Notes, Method Bank).
• Compact Action Buttons: AI Chat, Save, Preview, Print, and Export actions are icon-first by default, with an optional setting to show text labels.

🤖 Local AI Assistant (Experimental Foundation)

• Local-First Runtime: AI integration is being implemented on top of Tauri with local model execution (no required cloud account).
• Model Catalog: Includes current practical local families (Gemma 4, Qwen 3, Llama 3.2, DeepSeek R1 8B, Mistral Small 3.1, Phi 4) with per-model disk/RAM/VRAM guidance and runtime defaults.
• Capability Chips: Model cards provide neutral capability hints (reasoning, multilingual, low-latency, long-context, english-focused) instead of hard recommendations.
• Thinking Mode Awareness: Chat thinking toggle is model-aware and only sends thinking requests for supported models.
• No Terminal Popups (Windows): Runtime setup, model installs, imports, and chat-related runtime calls execute with hidden process flags so random command windows do not flash while using AI features.
• Runtime Diagnostics Panel: AI Settings now show runtime availability, server status, preferred backend, detected hardware, and active model processor usage from ollama ps (for example, CPU-only vs GPU usage).
• Cross-Platform Backend Strategy:
  • Windows: prefers cuda when NVIDIA tooling is detected, otherwise CPU fallback.
  • macOS Intel + Apple Silicon: prefers metal.
  • Linux: prefers cuda for NVIDIA, rocm for AMD ROCm environments, otherwise CPU fallback.
  • Hybrid GPU systems: when backend is cuda, inference targets NVIDIA GPUs (for example, RTX 4090) instead of integrated AMD graphics.
• Direct Download Mode: You can use download-only mode so Install opens external Gemma 4 download pages (Hugging Face / Kaggle) without starting or managing Ollama.
• Settings Integration: A new AI settings tab is available for enable/disable, chat persistence policy, default model selection, and model install/remove actions with progress + cancel.
• Settings Durability: UI preferences are persisted in app storage and mirrored to a Vault backup file (.teacherpro/ui-settings.backup.json) for easier recovery across app updates.
• Source Discovery: AI settings include quick links to external Gemma catalogs (e.g., Hugging Face and Kaggle) for newer variants.
• Privacy Boundary: Lesson and mindmap content remains in your Vault; AI runtime metadata is managed outside the Vault.

---

🚀 Use Cases

• Teachers: Plan your entire semester ahead of time, attaching the exact PDF worksheets or slideshows you need right next to the lesson structure.
• Tutors: Generate customized PDF summaries and study mindmaps to export and hand back to your students after a session.
• Professors: Keep research and lecture materials tightly organized and visually mapped without relying on messy folder structures.

---

📦 Installation

Pre-compiled, ready-to-run installers for Windows, macOS, and Linux are available in the Releases tab.

🔖 Automated Release Flow (Recommended)

TeacherPro now uses a tag-driven release pipeline with version synchronization across:

• package.json
• package-lock.json
• src-tauri/Cargo.toml
• src-tauri/tauri.conf.json

To publish a new installer release:

1. Prepare notes in RELEASE_NOTES_vX.Y.Z.md (for example RELEASE_NOTES_v1.2.2.md).

2. Push your code changes.

3. Create and push a matching tag:

   git tag v1.2.2
   git push origin v1.2.2

4. GitHub Actions workflow Release builds installers for Windows, macOS, and Linux and uploads them as assets to the draft release.

If you need to rebuild installers for an existing version tag, run Build Installers manually from the Actions tab and provide version (without the v prefix, e.g. 1.2.2).

🍎 macOS Users: "App is damaged" Error

Because TeacherPro is an open-source app and not currently signed with a paid Apple Developer certificate, macOS Gatekeeper may flag the downloaded app as "damaged" and tell you to move it to the trash.

To fix this and run the app safely:

1. Move TeacherPro.app (from the downloaded .dmg) to your Applications folder.
2. Open your Mac's Terminal app.
3. Run the following command to remove the quarantine flag:

   xattr -cr /Applications/TeacherPro.app

4. You can now open TeacherPro normally!

(Note: Replace the link above with your actual GitHub repository URL once published!)

---

🛠 Building from Source

If you want to build the project yourself or contribute:

Prerequisites

1. Node.js: v20 or higher.
2. Rust: Install the latest stable Rust toolchain via rustup.
3. Tauri System Dependencies: Specifically required if building on Linux. Check the Tauri Prerequisites guide.

Development Setup

Clone the repository and install the frontend dependencies:

git clone https://github.com/Panolix/TeacherPro.git
cd TeacherPro
npm install

Start the local development server (with hot-reloading):

npm run tauri dev

Build the final native application executable for your current OS:

npm run tauri build

The compiled files will appear under src-tauri/target/release/bundle/.

---

📜 Documentation & Architecture

TeacherPro uses a live documentation system to track design decisions, remaining gaps, and app features. If you are developing or modifying the codebase, please refer to:

• FEATURE_TRACKER.md - The single source of truth for the codebase function map, UX decisions, and recently completed tasks.
• PROJECT_PLAN.md - The initial architectural phase planning map.
• AI_IMPLEMENTATION_PLAN.md - The implementation roadmap and acceptance criteria for local AI features.

---

⚖️ License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

You are free to download, use, modify, and share this software! However, you must adhere to the following conditions:

• Attribution: You must give appropriate credit to the original author, provide a link to the license, and indicate if any changes were made.
• NonCommercial: You may not use the material for commercial purposes (you cannot sell this software or use it within a commercial product without explicit permission or profit-sharing arrangements).

See the LICENSE file for the full legal text.