macOS
Download the disk image and drag Tidebreak to Applications.
Download for macOS (Apple Silicon)
Releases ship an Apple Silicon (aarch64) build only. There is no Intel
build; on an Intel Mac, build from source.
The macOS app is signed and notarized, so it opens without a Gatekeeper
override. Each download has a .sha256 sidecar on the same release if you want
to check it:
shasum -a 256 -c Tidebreak-macos-apple-silicon.dmg.sha256
An installed macOS build keeps itself current. It checks for a newer signed release in the background and asks before restarting.
Windows and Linux
There is no prebuilt package for either. Build from source.
Windows installers shipped through v0.34.0, but the Windows release build is paused: releases are macOS-only until it comes back. Nothing about Windows support has been withdrawn, and the code that produces the installer is still in the tree — it is the build that is parked, for cost reasons. A Windows user on the last packaged release has no upgrade path other than building.
Build from source
You need the Rust toolchain pinned in rust-toolchain.toml (rustup picks it
up automatically), pnpm, the Tauri CLI, and CMake.
cargo install tauri-cli --version "^2"
CMake is required because the desktop app compiles a local speech-to-text
engine (brew install cmake on macOS; the cmake package on Linux).
Then, from a clone of the repository:
scripts/dev.sh
That installs the UI dependencies and opens the app window. Arguments are
forwarded to cargo tauri dev.
On Linux you also need the platform WebView dependencies (WebKitGTK); see the Tauri prerequisites.
Where your data lives
Tidebreak owns one application data directory, created on first launch:
| Platform | Path |
|---|---|
| macOS | ~/Library/Application Support/io.brightwave.tidebreak |
| Windows | %APPDATA%\io.brightwave.tidebreak |
Inside it:
| Item | What it holds |
|---|---|
tidebreak.db | The SQLite database: chats, messages, turns, event history, document metadata, and canonical text |
blobs/ | The original bytes of every document you attached |
tidebreak.lock | Proof that one process owns this directory |
Provider API keys are not in that directory. They go to your OS credential
store (the login keychain on macOS) under the service name tidebreak.
While Tidebreak is pre-1.0, opening a database written by an older build can rebuild it from scratch rather than migrate it. Do not treat this directory as durable storage for anything you cannot lose. Export what you care about.
Running it headless
The same server the desktop app embeds can run on its own:
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-... cargo run -p tidebreak-cli -- serve
It prints a loopback URL and a per-launch bearer token. See Running headless for the other commands.