Quick start

Welcome to Kerlig – your AI writing assistant for macOS! This quick start guide will walk you through the onboarding process and help you set it up.

Onboarding: Define Your Hotkey

During onboarding you will define a hotkey that will be used to launch the Kerlig app. This could be any key combination that is comfortable and easy to remember for you. For instance ⌥ Option + Space, ⌘ Command + ⇧ Shift + K etc.

Onboarding: Add API Keys

To enable access to language models from OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini and others, provide your API keys for these platforms. If you use Kerlig via Setapp, models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are included with your subscription, no API keys needed.

Using Kerlig

Now that you've completed the onboarding process, you're all set!

To use Kerlig with a text context, select the text in any application and simply press the hotkey that you defined during setup. This will open Kerlig with the selected text as the initial context for the AI conversation.

Alternatively, if you wish to open a blank new AI chat without any pre-selected text, just press the hotkey and Kerlig will open and ready to start a new conversation.

Agentic Mode

When you ask a question by hand, the AI can also use tools: read the window you launched Kerlig from, fetch links, or search your past chats. You approve every new tool before it runs. Learn more in Agentic Mode.