↓ Install.

— curl one line, or build it yourself.

curl -fsSL https://hippobrain.org/install.sh | sh

1 — Quick install (Apple Silicon)

The one-liner above downloads the latest release tarball, verifies its SHA-256 checksum, installs binaries to ~/.local/bin/, drops a default config at ~/.config/hippo/config.toml, and starts the LaunchAgents. It runs without sudo and writes nothing outside your home directory.

2 — Manual installation

For contributors who want to build from source. Release binaries are arm64-only today; Intel Macs need to build from source.

# prerequisites: rustup, uv, mise, oMLX (or LM Studio)
git clone https://github.com/stevencarpenter/hippo.git
cd hippo

# build the daemon + brain
mise run install

The mise run install task does a full clean install: builds the Rust workspace, syncs the Python brain via uv, installs LaunchAgents under ~/Library/LaunchAgents/, drops the Native Messaging manifest for Firefox, starts services, and runs hippo doctor to verify.

3 — Verify it’s working

Run the doctor. Ten checks, sub-second wall-clock, exit code = number of failures.

hippo doctor

Expected output looks like the sample on the homepage. If you see [!!] or [WW], run hippo doctor --explain for cause / fix / doc per failure. The full failure-mode catalogue lives at /docs/capture/operator-runbook.

4 — Uninstall

Hippo doesn’t hide its uninstaller.

hippo daemon uninstall   # removes LaunchAgents and binaries
rm ~/.local/share/hippo/hippo.db   # if you also want to drop the database

The database stays untouched unless you remove it explicitly. The shell hook entry in ~/.zshrc is left as-is; the line is harmless if hippo isn’t running, but you can delete it if you prefer.