Skip to content
Minnow
GitHub
Download

Minnow manual

Minnow is a full agentic development workspace that runs on your own computer: editor, agents, terminal, git, issues, planning, knowledge, and local model hosting in one app. It talks to models you host yourself — LM Studio, Ollama, llama-server, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint — and it can also talk to cloud APIs if you give it a key. Either way, your chats, notes, files, and credentials stay in a folder on your disk. Nothing is uploaded to Minnow’s authors, and there is no telemetry — an arrangement that was once unremarkable and is now, apparently, a feature.

You open a project folder and land in Home, with chats, boards, issues, repository changes, and code activity together. Open Code takes you to your files and editor beside chat, driving the same repo. Five surfaces support that work from the app rail — Source Control, Models, Brain, Issues, and Scheduler — plus Settings from the menubar. The same assistant and tool set back all of them, which is the part that matters: an issue the agent files, a branch it makes, and a note it writes all refer to the same project, without you carrying anything between windows.

This manual covers the packaged app you install from GitHub Releases. If you build from source, everything here still applies, plus the developer setup notes in the GitHub Wiki.

Start here

If you have five minutes, do these three things in order:

  1. Install Minnow and let it open.
  2. Connect a model — without one, the model picker stays empty and nothing can answer you.
  3. Send your first chat and approve your first tool call.

After that, How Minnow works is the page that makes the rest of the product make sense.

Finding help while you work

The ? button in the menubar opens this manual inside Minnow. Press Ctrl+K / Cmd+K while it is open to jump to search. Pages match the version you have installed.

Chat can also read this manual. In General mode (and during first-run onboarding) the assistant has three read-only tools — minnow_docs_search, minnow_docs_read, minnow_docs_list — so you can ask “how do I point Minnow at Ollama?” and get an answer with a page citation instead of a guess.

Press ? anywhere outside a text field for the keyboard shortcut sheet.

Brain is not this manual. Brain is your own wiki, and you can edit it. This manual ships with the build and is read-only. See Wiki and Brain if the two get confused.

Everything in this manual

Get started

Core concepts

Chat

Apps

  • Code — editor, terminal, git, dev servers, preview: the surface you work in
  • Source Control Center — changes, history, branches, stashes, worktrees, pull requests, CI
  • Apps overview — Code and the surfaces around it, and how each one opens
  • Models — downloads, local serving, providers, routing, sampler, usage
  • Issues — list, board, agent triage
  • Brain — your wiki, memories, ingest, and code index
  • Scheduler — interval and cron jobs
  • Settings — the full map of every settings section

Orchestrate

Extend Minnow

Reference

Edit this page Updated 2026-09-15
---