NeonSidekick v0.5.0

Neon Sidekick now runs on the Mac

v0.5.0 is the first release with a macOS build for Apple Silicon Macs (M1 and later), alongside the Windows x64 build. It runs in Terminal or iTerm2, and almost everything Windows has works there:

• Chat, tools, MCP, Git, sessions, skills and headless mode, with zsh as the shell (bash and pwsh can be picked).
• Databases: SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL and SQLite. SQL Server's Windows sign-in works through Kerberos (kinit); see BUILD.md.
• The embedded LLM on Metal: the app downloads llama.cpp's macOS build and runs the model on the Apple Silicon GPU. A 16 GB Mac suits the smaller Gemma models.
• Voice: Kokoro speech and Whisper voice input (on Metal), push-to-talk, the wake word and interrupting a reply.
• Pictures: pasting, dropping, image_info and image_edit through Apple's ImageIO, including HEIC, TIFF and AVIF. Pictures paste off the clipboard (Ctrl+V or Option+V).
• The app's windows: the picture viewer, thumbnail browser, picture menu, /log and /process windows.
• Camera, screen capture and YouTube playback on macOS 14 or later: the built-in camera, a USB webcam or an iPhone as Continuity Camera.
• The performance bar (GPU memory reads as GMEM, the GPU's share of unified memory) and /terminal, which opens a new Terminal window or iTerm2 tab.
• Secrets in the Keychain: API keys and database passwords are encrypted with a key kept in your login Keychain.

Not on the Mac yet: printing, Docker (the tools, /docker and Docker servers), \\server shares, /shortcut and /keycheck. /tools shows those groups as needing Windows.

Installing on a Mac: download NeonSidekick-v0.5.0-osx-arm64.tar.gz, unpack it, and clear macOS's quarantine once (the build isn't notarized):

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine NeonSidekick-v0.5.0-osx-arm64
cd NeonSidekick-v0.5.0-osx-arm64 && ./NeonSidekick

When macOS asks whether the app may use its Keychain key, choose Always Allow. For the Ctrl+Option shortcuts, set Option to act as Meta in your terminal. A few chords a Mac terminal can't send have stand-ins: Ctrl+D for /model, Ctrl+] for /terminal. BUILD.md › The Mac build has the full details and known issues.

New on both platforms

• /find searches the transcript (also Ctrl+Shift+F on Windows): every match marked, Enter or F3 for older matches, Shift+Enter or Shift+F3 for newer, and folded tool calls, code and thinking open where they match.
• Typing in any info pane finds in it: /help, /sys, /about, /tree, Docker logs and the others.
• Lock a skill from its page in /skills: nothing but your own editor can change it, the model included.
• Skill versions: /skills' Offered tab shows each skill's version; revert lists the kept versions by number, asks before putting one back, and can remove kept versions.
• Saved YouTube videos (/youtube save, /youtube saved) resume where you left off.
• /srvcopy <profile> copies this profile's server settings (LLM, embedded, Docker, Anthropic/OpenAI/Claude CLI switches) into another profile, as /keycopy does for keys.
• /shortcut [profile] [--log] puts a launch shortcut for a profile on the desktop (Windows).
• The shell approval pane shows the whole command: press v to read a long command or a script in full before approving it. Database write approvals have the same view.
• List panes show more: the highlighted row in full under the list (/sessions, /queue, /rewind, /process, /docker, /server, /model, /mcp…), and the long lists filter as you type.
• The panes work one way: every remove asks first, key letters are lowercase everywhere, and empty lists still open.
• Tab strips show the current tab in bold, underlined and in the accent colour; descriptions under the lists have room for four rows; /memory shows the highlighted memory in full.
• About pane label now leads with ℹ️.

Changes and fixes

• The Home Assistant to-do tool (ha_todo) is off in new profiles until switched on in /tools.
• image_info and image_edit no longer swap the sides of a sideways phone photo a second time, so crops and sizes are planned against the picture as it shows.
• youtube_play answers "Playing" for a new window with autoplay on, instead of "Cued".
• A folder's zip lists its entries sorted by path, so the same folder zips the same way on every machine.
• Several tests that failed only on loaded CI machines now wait for the state they check.

Downloads

Platform	Package
Windows x64	NeonSidekick-v0.5.0-win-x64.zip
macOS, Apple Silicon	NeonSidekick-v0.5.0-osx-arm64.tar.gz

Each has a .sha256 file beside it to check the download.

Full Changelog: v0.4.1...v0.5.0