About Kherve Tools
Kherve Tools is a growing family of desktop applications for scientists, written in Python. It began with KherveFitting — an XPS peak-fitting program — and has since grown to cover documents, slides, spreadsheets, PDFs, drawing, plotting, and a computational notebook that ties them all together.
The name Kherve is short in Brezhoneg (the Celtic language of Brittany) for Kerhervé. Every tool shares the same look, the same care, and the same goal: doing real scientific work with software built by people who do it too.
Made by a scientist, for scientists
These tools exist because they were needed for real research — fitting spectra, writing papers, making figures, keeping data organised. It turns out you don't need a big team or a big institution to build good software; you need someone who got tired of the alternatives. Kherve Tools is independent and built by a small, growing family of contributors.
The tools
KherveBook — A computational notebook — and the future home of every Kherve tool.
KherveFitting — Open-source XPS peak fitting, elegant and simple to use.
KherveDB — The NIST XPS binding-energy database, preserved and searchable.
KherveNoise — Remove noise from a spectrum — and see exactly what was removed.
KhervePDF — A PDF viewer and annotation editor with built-in Git history.
KherveTeX — WYSIWYG document editing that produces beautiful LaTeX PDFs.
KherveMol — Draw chemical compounds and crystal structures in 2D and 3D.
KherveSheet — An Excel-inspired spreadsheet workbench for scientific data.
KhervePaint — Draw anything scientific — by hand, from the library, or by AI.
KherveSlide — A WYSIWYG slide designer that produces Beamer LaTeX.- KhervePlot — Publication-quality scientific plotting.(coming soon)
KherveCAD — Vibe design in 3D — describe it, and Claude builds it.
KhervePY — A lightweight, GitHub-first Python IDE — built for vibe coding.
KherveRef — A free reference manager for LaTeX and Word — an alternative to Zotero and Mendeley, Git-synced and AI-ready (local AI and Claude over MCP).
KherveLAB — Book a lab's instruments, approve requests and bill each user's time.
KherveNote — Take notes while someone speaks — the talk is transcribed on your computer, and Claude helps turn it into a LaTeX / PDF note.
Author
Made by the Kerhervé family.
Licensing
Kherve tools come under different terms — some are free and open source, others are commercial. Each tool's own page shows its licensing and pricing. When a tool has an associated publication, its page also shows how to cite it; see, for example, About KherveFitting.