Installing Innesta

Innesta is a native Mac application. There is no browser engine inside it and nothing to configure before it will start: download the disk image, drag Innesta into your Applications folder, and open it.

What it needs

Innesta runs on macOS 14 Sonoma or later, on Apple Silicon. There is no Intel build.

It also needs Git — the same git your Terminal uses. Innesta drives that binary rather than reimplementing it, which is why a repository you open here behaves exactly as it does on the command line, and why anything you do in one is immediately visible in the other. If you have ever installed the Xcode command line tools you already have it; if not, macOS offers to install them the first time anything asks for git, and Innesta asks on first launch.

The first launch

Opening Innesta for the first time starts a five-step onboarding: choose or create a project, review the name and email address Git will put on your commits, choose how commit messages are drafted, optionally connect a GitHub or GitLab account, and look over the defaults it settled on.

Most of it can be revisited. The AI choice and the account are in Settings afterwards, and the project you pick first is not a commitment — Innesta opens as many repositories as you like. Two things are asked only here: the Git identity, which afterwards is git config --global like any other Git setting, and the Playground below.

If you would rather not point it at real work yet, onboarding offers to create a Playground: a local repository of its own that exists to be experimented with. Nothing you do in it can reach anything you care about.

Updates

Innesta checks for its own updates and installs them in place. Releases are signed and notarised by Apple, so macOS opens them without the warning it shows for unidentified developers.