Frequently asked questions
What Kai is, how to install it, and which file to pick.
Kai is a desktop terminal for macOS, Linux, and Windows (built with Tauri 2 and Rust). It has tabs, split panes, and a built-in way to run AI coding tools on your own code. MIT licensed.
Free. No accounts, no cloud, no tracking. Everything stays on your machine, and secret files like .env are skipped automatically.
Download the installer for your system, open a terminal, and run kai open to launch Kai on your project folder. Inside Kai, run kai claude . (replace claude with your tool’s command).
Whatever is installed on your machine. Kai detects your tools, fills in their settings for you, and keeps a backup of what was there before.
It pairs a normal fast terminal (tabs, splits, search) with the AI plumbing: it maps your code, shares that map with the AI tool, and cleans AI credit lines out of your commit messages.
macOS: .dmg (Apple Silicon M1–M4). Linux: .deb for Ubuntu/Debian, or .AppImage for anything else. Windows: .exe or .msi (64-bit).
The app isn’t signed yet, so macOS blocks it — the file itself is fine. Eject the image, run xattr -d com.apple.quarantine on the .dmg, reopen it, drag Kai to Applications, then run xattr -cr /Applications/Kai.app and right-click Kai > Open once.