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Getting started

Install Gisti and press ⌥+Space, no permissions needed to start.

Install

  1. Get Gisti on the App Store.
  2. Click Get, then Install.
  3. Launch Gisti. It lives in your menu bar; there is no Dock icon.

Gisti is distributed on the Mac App Store, so macOS handles installation, code signing, and updates for you: no DMG, no Gatekeeper prompts, nothing to keep up to date by hand.

First launch

Press ⌥ Space. The Spotlight-like window appears – no permissions to grant first. That window is Gisti. There is nothing else to learn.

The basics

  • Type in the input field. ⏎ saves the text as a note. ⌥ ⏎ inserts a new line, ⌘ ⏎ starts an AI chat about it.
  • Copy anything anywhere on your Mac, and it lands in the Stream automatically.
  • Press ⌘ K on any element for actions: summarize, copy, favorite, share, export.
  • Switch modes with ⌘ 1 (Stream), ⌘ 2 (Topics), ⌘ 3 (Gist).
  • Escape closes anything, then the window itself.

The menu bar icon

Gisti’s icon sits in the menu bar, near the clock. It flashes briefly whenever something is captured: a copy, a screenshot, a clip from the browser. Click it for a small menu:

  • Open Gisti: show the main window (same as ⌥ Space).
  • Take Screenshot: start a capture (same as ⇧ ⌘ X, see Screenshots).
  • Monitoring: pause or resume clipboard history without quitting the app.
  • Settings: open the Settings panel.
  • Welcome Guide: reopen the first-launch welcome window.
  • Quit: quit Gisti entirely; hotkeys and clipboard history stop until the next launch.

Optional: AI

AI is off until you configure a provider in Settings → AI (⌘ 4). Cloud providers need an API key; local ones (Ollama, LM Studio, MLX) need a URL. See AI.

Also off by default – flip Enable Semantic Search in Settings and Gisti downloads a small local model to start searching by meaning, not just keywords, and clustering your Stream into Topics. No API key, nothing leaves your Mac. See Semantic search.