Get started

Install

A disk image, a drag to Applications, and a glyph in the menu bar. macOS 14 or later, no account, no licence key.

Minne is one download. There is nothing to sign up for, no licence key and no trial period — the app is MIT-licensed, and the only account involved is the one you already hold with an AI provider.

#What you need

• macOS 14.0 or later. The bundle declares it as its minimum system version and the Swift package is built against it; older releases will not launch.
• An AI provider. Minne ships no model. A Claude or ChatGPT subscription, an Anthropic or OpenAI API key, or a model running on your own machine will all do — see Choose your AI. You can install first and decide later.

That is the whole list. No account, no server, no companion app on your phone.

#Download

Minne.dmg always points at the newest release. The current version is 0.1.5.

The link is a redirect to the latest tagged build, so it stays correct after every release. Every other asset on the releases page is a version-stamped copy of the same thing.

#Install

Open the disk image and drag Minne onto the Applications shortcut beside it. Eject the image; you can throw it away afterwards.

Then launch Minne from Applications or Spotlight. Nothing appears in the Dock, which is the point of the next section.

#Where the app lives

Minne is a menu-bar app — LSUIElement in the bundle, which means macOS gives it no Dock icon, no application menu and no window on launch. It appears as a brain glyph in the menu bar, and that glyph is the whole interface: click it for the menu, or press ⌥Space for chat.

On a MacBook with a notch the first launch nudges the item into the right-hand cluster, beside Wi-Fi and the clock. macOS quietly declines to draw status items in the region the notch claims, and the default leftmost slot is inside it — an app that ran perfectly while looking absent. Once you have ⌘-dragged the item anywhere yourself, macOS remembers your position instead and Minne never touches it again.

The bundle identifier is sh.minne.app. macOS uses it for the Accessibility grant, which is why it matters later.

#First launch

The onboarding window opens by itself and asks for one permission and one provider. It is short, and skipping any of it is allowed. First run walks through it.

#Launching at login

Settings → General has Launch Minne at login. It uses the modern SMAppService registration, so there is no login item to hunt for in System Settings and no helper app.

The checkbox is disabled when Minne is not running from an app bundle — the bare executable swift build produces has no bundle for macOS to register.

#A build you made yourself

A bundle you build locally is ad-hoc signed: valid enough to run, not notarized. macOS quarantines such an app once it has travelled through a browser, a chat app or AirDrop, and then refuses to open it with a message about damage.

It is not damaged. Strip the quarantine attribute:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Minne.app

Or right-click the app and choose Open once; the exception sticks.

Build from source covers that path properly.

#Updating

There is no auto-updater. Download the new disk image, quit Minne, and drag the new copy over the old one.

Your memory is untouched by this: it lives in ~/Minne and ~/Library/Application Support/Minne, neither of which is inside the app bundle. See Files and paths.

#Uninstalling

Quit Minne from the menu bar first, so nothing is mid-write.

Deleting the app alone leaves your memory intact, which is usually what you want if you are reinstalling.

If you would rather do it from inside the app, Settings → Privacy has Delete All Memory…, which empties ~/Minne for you. It is final — there is no server-side copy to restore from. Files and paths says exactly what sits where.

macOS keeps the Accessibility grant after the app is gone. Remove the entry in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility if you want no trace at all.