First run and characters

The Assistant's character

The Assistant has a face: at first, the Mooring icon come to life, in a rounded cap. It guides you through the first-run window, greets you in an empty main window, introduces each tip, and keeps an eye on your Claude plan limits in the Usage window.

What the character says is a friendly extra. The page around it always says everything you need. With Reduce Motion on in System Settings, it stays still.

Choose a character

The Mooring icon is the default, but you can pick someone else to appear in all the same places. Open Settings ▸ General and find Assistants.

• Character shows each choice as a small picture. The default's tile says Assistant. The others are Compass, Nova, Owl, two drawn as the ✦ sparkle (a solid one, and Orbit with a ring), and Static bars.
• Messages is Character, where the character says its own words in a speech bubble, or Plain, where the same messages show as plain text.
• Motion is Animated, the default, or Still, which holds every character on one picture. Reduce Motion keeps them still either way.

Each character says the same things in its own words, and only the default talks like a sailor. Static bars shows flat bars that never move or speak, for anyone who wants less on screen.

On Christmas (24 to 26 December) and Halloween (31 October), the characters dress up for the day. There's no setting for it. Static bars and the two sparkle characters keep their usual look.

To see every character, action and look at once, hold Option and Shift and click any character's tile. That opens the Character gallery.

The first-run window

The first time you open Mooring, a short window sets it up in four steps. A step that is already done, such as git being installed, shows a green tick and moves on by itself after a couple of seconds. Click Continue to move on sooner.

1. Welcome to Mooring. Click Get Started.

2. Mooring needs git. Mooring uses git for the Changes tab, worktrees and cloning projects. Click Install Command-Line Tools… to install Apple's free tools. Mooring carries on by itself when the install finishes. You can also click Continue Without Git and install it later.

3. Let Claude search your whole Mac. This step is optional. Claude sometimes searches your whole disk, and macOS guards other apps' private folders. Full Disk Access lets those searches through.

   1. Click Open System Settings….
   2. Turn on the switch next to Mooring. If Mooring isn't in the list, drag its icon from the small panel into the list.
   3. If macOS offers to quit and reopen Mooring, either answer is fine. Access works straight away.

   To skip it, click Not Now.

4. Where do your projects live? Click Choose Folder… and pick the folder that holds your projects, such as ~/Development. Mooring lists each folder inside it as a project.

Full Disk Access later

If you skipped Full Disk Access, Mooring reminds you gently:

• A ⚠ in the status bar at the bottom of the window. Click it to read more and fix it.
• If macOS blocks a Claude search, the title bar says macOS blocked a search with a Fix… button, at most once a day. Click Don't Ask Again to stop these.

To turn it on, or to turn the reminders back on, open Settings ▸ General ▸ Full Disk Access.

An empty main window

Until you pick a project, the Assistant waves from the main window and shows three steps:

1. Pick a project. Click one in the sidebar, or one of its worktrees. To make one, choose File ▸ New Project… (⇧⌘N).
2. Open your cards. A new install already shows the Cards tab on the right. If the panel is shut, click the round button at the right end of the title bar, or press ⌥⌘3.
3. Add a card. Type in the New note box at the top of the Cards tab (⌘N), then click Add (⌘⏎).

In a project with no cards yet, the Assistant points to the New note box until you add the first one. See Cards.

Tips

Each time Mooring opens, it shows a tip, laid out like the Mac's own What's New sheets. The Assistant says its heading. On a tip that's new in this version it waves and says what's new in Mooring. On the rest it points the way to the tip.

• Click a dot under the tip, or press ← and →, to move between tips.
• See All Tips… opens Help ▸ Tips, where every tip lives, grouped by category, with a search field.
• Done closes the sheet, and so does Esc. On your very first launch the button says Get Started.
• Untick Show tips at startup to stop the sheet opening.