Using Arci

The bar

Your shortcut opens Arci on the screen your pointer is on. The empty bar shows your apps, most used first, and above the bar your three most recent things under Recent — click one to do it again.

As you type, Arci shows what fits: matching apps, an answer card for a calculation or conversion, matching actions. The right end of the bar always says what ↩ will do. esc goes back one step; at the top, it puts Arci away. Clicking anywhere else does too.

Apps

Arci finds apps in /Applications, /System/Applications, /System/Library/CoreServices and ~/Applications, one folder level deep — iPhone and iPad apps that run on your Mac, and apps that live in the menu bar, included — and notices when you add or remove one. Type any letters of a name in order (vsc finds Visual Studio Code) and press ↩. Apps you open more rank higher, and Arci learns which app you pick for what you type.

Arci's own screens are found the same way: Arci Settings, Arci Notes, Arci Colors, Arci Timers, Clipboard History, and the tools Search Files, Kill Process, Pick Color and Emoji & Symbols.

Calculations and conversions

These answer as you type, offline. When no app matches, ↩ copies the answer.

Calculator

+ - * / ^ % and parentheses; words work too — plus, minus, times, divided by, of, mod — and so do ×, ÷ and −. Functions sqrt, sin, cos, tan (radians), log, ln, abs, round, floor, ceil; constants pi and e. 15% of 80 is 12. A lone number isn't treated as a sum.

Units

12 km in miles, 72 f to c, 500 gb in tb, 12km in mi — length, mass, temperature, data, volume, time, speed and area.

Currency

100 usd to inr, $50 to eur ($ € £ ₹ ¥ work as codes). Rates are the European Central Bank's, fetched at most once a day and kept, so conversions work offline.

Time and dates

Time zones and date arithmetic, written the way you'd say it:

• 330 singapore time, 9am pst in ist, time in tokyo, tokyo
• days until dec 25, in 45 days, since jan 1, next friday, 3 weeks ago
• 9:15 to 17:40, 2h 30m + 45m, 2h 30m in minutes, 1760000000 (a Unix timestamp)
• time shows your clock and your world clock, date today with its week and day of the year, unix the Unix time

An hour without am or pm reads as a working hour, and the other reading is shown small. Add places to your world clock in Settings → Time.

Actions

Type something and press ⇥: the strip of actions opens — search the web, ask AI, save as a note, translate, and any you've added. ⇥ or → moves along it, ← back, ↩ runs the chosen one. A group opens its own strip; ⇧⇥ or esc steps back out. Typing returns you to the bar.

When your apps fit in one row, actions also show as rows under them; ↓ moves into them. Your searches — Google, the App Store and any you add — sit together under Search, the rest under Actions. The one you usually pick for words like these comes first, marked usual, and ↩ lands on it.

• Keywords run an action directly: with the keyword yt, yt lofi beats ↩ searches YouTube.
• Hotkeys run an action from any app, without opening Arci first — fix the grammar of what you've selected, copy text from the screen with ⇧⌘8.
• When nothing matches what you typed, ↩ searches the web with your first search action.

Results stream into the panel. ⌘C copies a result, ⌘S keeps it as a note. An action set to paste shows you its result first and pastes into your app only when you press ↩.

Settings → Actions lists your actions in order, searches together, with a switch to turn each off, its usage, and its fields to edit; Edit JSON opens the file itself. Actions is the reference for making your own.

The paste chip

Press ⌘V in the empty bar and what you pasted becomes a chip above the bar — "Pasted · 38 lines · 412 words" — instead of filling it. The bar is then for saying what to do with it.

Arci works out what the paste is — a link, a YouTube video, an email address, a phone number, an address, JSON, a code or ID, a list, a phrase or prose — and offers only what fits: define a word, summarize the page a link goes to, open the link or strip its tracking, start an email, call, open in Maps, format JSON, remove duplicate lines, sort, change case, append it to your previous copy, translate it (first, when it's in another language), save it as a note, a time it mentions in your time zone, or a reminder before it. Type to filter — "snake", "slug", "base64", "join", "quotes" find the text tools — or type an instruction for AI.

⇥ switches to the AI tab, which names the provider, model and rough size before anything is sent. ⌫ on the empty bar removes the chip. Text a password manager marked as hidden shows as dots, and Arci does nothing with it.

Selected text

Select text with the mouse in any app — drag across it, or double- or triple-click — and a strip of chips appears over it: Copy, Append (adds it to the end of what's on the clipboard, for collecting a list one piece at a time) and Search, with Cut and Paste when the text can be edited — and Paste Plain when what you copied has fonts or colours, so it lands looking like the text around it.

When the text is something in particular, the chips the paste chip would lead with come next, in the accent colour: a YouTube link gets Summarize the video and Transcribe the video, a link to a page gets Summarize the page, a word gets Define (the Mac's own Dictionary, on this Mac), text you can edit gets Fix Grammar, an email address New email, an address Open in Maps, a time Remind me, text in another language Translate, a code name like userAccountId its snake_case, kebab-case and CONSTANT_CASE, URL-, Base64- or HTML-encoded text Decode, a paragraph copied out of a PDF Join lines, a column of numbers Copy sum, and a GitHub owner/repo, an npm package, a DOI or an IP address the action that opens it. Your own actions can be offered this way too — see Offered by itself. The grid at the end opens the bar with the selection as its chip, for everything else.

When the selection was in a field you can edit, a rewrite of it — Fix Grammar, a change of case, anything you ask AI to do with it — goes back in its place: the bar's hint says ↩ replace the selection, and ⌘C still copies.

From the keyboard: open Arci and press ⌘E on the empty bar — what's selected in the app you were in becomes the chip. Settings → General → Bring the selection into Arci records a shortcut that does it from anywhere, in one press.

The strip never takes the keys: the app you selected in stays in front. It goes away when you type, scroll, click elsewhere or move the mouse away. It never shows for a password field.

Safari, Mail, Notes and most Mac apps share their selection directly. Chrome, Brave, Edge, Slack, VS Code and other browsers and Electron apps don't, so Arci copies the selection for a moment and puts your clipboard back; there, Cut and Paste aren't offered. Settings → General → When you select text turns the strip off, keeps it out of browsers and Electron apps, or keeps it out of the apps you list.

Summarize the page summarizes on the engine in Settings → AI — on-device, or your own key. When the page is open in Safari, Arci reads it from there: signed in, past a paywall, as you see it. Otherwise it fetches the page, and a page behind a sign-in or paywall often gives only its opening; Arci says when that's all it could read.

Clipboard history

⇧⌘V from any app, or clip in the bar (clip invoice searches). Search by words, by app, or by kind — "image", "link".

Text and links are kept 30 days and images and files 7 by default, counted from their last use; pinned clips stay. Passwords, API keys, card numbers and one-time codes are masked, never written to disk, and gone after 10 minutes. Copies made in Passwords and Keychain Access are never kept, nor anything a password manager marks as hidden — add more apps to ignore in Settings → Clipboard. The history is encrypted on disk with a key in your Keychain. Settings → Clipboard also changes the shortcut, how long things are kept, or turns it off.

History

↑ on the empty bar, or ⌘Y anywhere in Arci, opens everything you've run — apps, answers, links, results — newest by the bar, searchable.

• ↩ does it again: opens the app or link, copies the value, starts the timer, or reopens an answer exactly as it was — without asking the AI again.
• ⇥ puts what you typed back in the bar to edit.
• ⌘⌫ forgets a row, and what Arci learned from it.

Arci learns from what you choose: the app you open for what you type ranks first, and the action you usually run for a kind of query becomes the usual. Ask a question you've asked before and the earlier answer is offered first. Only things that worked are kept. Text you pasted, selected or captured is described ("38 lines pasted", "selection in Mail"), not stored — though a result can contain what it worked on. Settings → History turns recording, keeping results or learning off, sets how long history is kept, and clears it.

Notes

⌘S on any result keeps it as a Markdown note — an answer is saved with its question and follow-ups. Notes are plain .md files in your notes folder (~/Library/Application Support/Arci/Notes unless you choose another in Settings → Notes, such as an iCloud or Obsidian folder). Saving never overwrites: each note is a new file.

Arci Notes lists and searches them.

If another app changes a note while you're editing it, Arci asks before saving over it.

Timers, alarms and reminders

Type one and press ↩:

• timer 25m tea, tea timer 4m, set a timer for 10 min, timer 1:30:00
• alarm 7am, wake me 6:30 tomorrow
• remind me to call mom at 5pm, remind me in 20 min to stretch, remind 3pm sgt standup
• pomodoro (25 minutes on, 5 off, four rounds, then 15) and stopwatch

It rings with a chime and a notification and counts down in the menu bar; alarms ring until you stop them. ⌘↩ on a reminder adds it to Apple Reminders instead, so it rings on your iPhone too.

Arci Timers (type timers, or from the menu bar) lists them: ↩ pauses, resumes, stops or starts again; ⇥ adds a minute, laps or snoozes; ⌘⌫ cancels. Settings → Time picks the chime and turns the menu bar countdown off.

Emoji & Symbols

⌃⌘Space from any app — it takes over macOS's emoji shortcut — or start the bar with :. Search emoji, Mac keys, arrows, math and currency signs by name: party, +1, command. Frequently used ones come first.

When a search finds nothing and Apple Intelligence is on, Arci asks it on your Mac — "running late" might bring up 🏃 and ⏳ — and remembers what you pick.

Search Files

Start the bar with ~, or open Search Files like an app. Type the start of any word in a file's name: ~invoice finds Tax Invoice.pdf and invoice-2025.pdf, and ~tax inv narrows it. Arci searches your home folder and iCloud Drive with Spotlight's index on your Mac. The best match sits by the bar: the whole name first, then names that start with what you typed, then files you opened or changed lately. With nothing typed, it lists the files you opened in the last 30 days.

macOS keeps Desktop, Documents, Downloads and iCloud Drive private until you let Arci in, so at first their files aren't listed, and the list says so. Press ⇥ there and macOS asks once for each folder. If you said no, ⇥ opens System Settings → Privacy & Security → Files & Folders. Arci never needs Full Disk Access. Hidden files, the inside of ~/Library, the inside of app bundles and node_modules are never listed, and apps stay in the grid.

Kill Process

Your running processes, by CPU or memory (⇥ switches), filtered by name or process id. ↩ asks the chosen one to quit, the way ⌘Q does. ⌥↩ asks first, and ⌥↩ again force-quits — unsaved work is lost. Only your own processes are listed, never Arci itself.

Pick Color

Pick Color shows the macOS loupe; the color you click is copied and kept in Arci Colors. There, search by hex, rgb or a name like "blue"; ↩ copies, ⇥ switches between HEX, RGB and HSL (Arci copies in the one you leave it on), ⌘↩ picks another, ⌘⌫ deletes.

Translate

Type text, ⇥, Translate. It goes into your Mac's language — or, for text already in it, the other language you used last. End with to malayalam or into french to choose. ↩ copies the translation.

Translation goes through Google Translate. When Google is limiting requests or you're offline, your Mac translates instead with Apple's on-device translation, and the panel says which one did. Set a Translate action to This Mac in Settings → Actions and it never uses Google — for the languages your Mac has downloaded in System Settings → General → Language & Region → Translation Languages.

AI

Settings → AI chooses who answers AI actions:

• On-device — Apple Intelligence on your Mac. Private, free, works offline. Needs a Mac that supports it, with Apple Intelligence turned on in System Settings.
• Your API key — Anthropic (Claude), OpenAI, Google Gemini or OpenRouter, with a key you add. The key is stored only in your Keychain; the provider bills you directly. Settings → AI also picks the model.

Answers stream in, formatted. Type in the bar to ask a follow-up; esc leaves, and a Back to answer row reopens it. ⌘C copies the answer, ⌘S saves it as a note.

YouTube. With a Gemini key (Settings → AI → YouTube videos), paste a YouTube link and Arci offers to summarize or transcribe the video. Only the link is sent; Gemini watches the public video.

Layouts

Settings → General → Layout:

• Default — the grid of your apps above the bar.
• Compact — the same panel, a fifth smaller.
• Minimal — just the bar, in the middle of the screen; apps and actions appear above it as you type.

Themes

Settings → General → Theme shows each one as a small picture of the panel; click one to switch:

• Ink — Prayukta's own colours, sharp corners, JetBrains Mono. The default.
• Paper — the same on warm paper.
• Dusk — plum glass your desktop shows through, soft rounded corners, a peach accent and the Mac's own type.

Any theme works with any layout. Answers' code stays monospaced in every theme.

Settings

⌘, from the panel, or from the menu bar. ⌘1–⌘8 switch panes:

The menu bar icon also has Keep Mac Awake — indefinitely, or for 1, 2 or 4 hours — which lasts until you turn it off or its time is up, even if Arci quits and opens again in between.

Keys