First Launch
What Daintree shows you the first time it opens: the welcome screen, the six-step agent setup wizard, the searchable launcher, the theme picker, and the getting-started checklist.
First launch
The first launch opens the Welcome Screen. Nothing pops up over you, and no wizard takes the window. The Welcome Screen shows one setup nudge at a time, and you decide when to act on it.
Daintree runs as a single instance. Try to open a second copy and it focuses the existing window instead.
Welcome Screen
The Welcome Screen is what you see when no project is open. It offers four quick actions:
- Open folder. Open an existing folder on your machine. This is the primary action.
- Create project. Start fresh in a new folder: you pick the parent directory, the folder name, and an emoji.
- Clone repository. Pull a repo from a Git URL. See Cloning a Repository.
- Launch agent. Open the panel palette and start an agent without opening a project at all.
Below that it shows exactly one nudge at a time, in priority order, so you never face a stack of competing cards:
- Set up your AI agents. A banner with a Set up agents button (opens the wizard) and a Not now link. Dismiss it and it stays dismissed across sessions.
- Installed agents found. After Daintree scans your PATH, if it finds agent CLIs you haven't pinned to the toolbar, this card lists them as chips with a Pin all to toolbar button. It shows up only once the banner is dealt with, when there's at least one launchable agent and none are pinned.
- Getting Started checklist. The inline checklist (covered below) takes over once the cards above are cleared.
Agent Setup Wizard
The wizard never opens itself. It runs only when you ask for it: the Set up agents banner on the Welcome Screen, Settings > CLI Agents > Run Setup Wizard, the Set up agents row in the launcher, or the Action Palette. Creating a worktree won't trigger it.
First run walks six steps. Re-running it later from Settings is a shorter three-step flow, because the consent steps only belong on a first run: a returning user already has those toggles in Settings. A row of dots in the footer tracks where you are.
| Step | What it asks | First run | Re-run |
|---|---|---|---|
| Appearance | Two theme cards with mini UI previews: Daintree (dark) and Bondi Beach (light). Clicking one applies it immediately. The rest live in Settings > Appearance. | Yes | No |
| Agents | The system requirements check, then the agent multi-select. | Yes | Yes |
| Privacy | A single Enable crash reporting switch, with a Preview what would be sent link. No file contents or credentials are ever included. | Yes | No |
| Install agents | Runs the install command for anything you selected that isn't already present. Skipped entirely when everything selected is already installed. | Yes | Yes |
| Agent permissions | The global Skip permission prompts for agents switch. Off is the safe default. See Security. | Yes | No |
| Setup complete | Counts the ready agents, lists each one with its preset count and launch shortcut, and offers Launch an agent. | Yes | Yes |
Closing the wizard before you reach Setup complete on a first run commits crash reporting as off and tells you so. Silence is not consent.
The system requirements check
The System requirements accordion sits at the top of the Agents step. It's collapsed by default, showing your Git and Node.js versions inline in the header when everything passes, and expands on its own when a required tool is missing. After installing one, click Re-check.
Continue stays disabled while the check is running and while a required tool is missing, so give it a moment to finish. It is also disabled until you've selected at least one agent: the footer says so.
Choosing agents
The agent list is split into two tiers:
- Featured: Claude, Gemini, Codex.
- More agents: everything else that can be launched: currently fourteen, from OpenCode and Aider through Antigravity, Grok, Cursor, Copilot, Goose, Amp, Crush, Qwen, Kimi, Open Interpreter, Mistral, and Kiro. Every new built-in agent lands here automatically.
Installed agents float to the top of their tier and are pre-selected. Gemini is still featured as shipped, but it's the deprecated one: pick Antigravity from the More agents tier if you want Google's current CLI.
Installing
Each selected agent gets a card with a status: Installed, Installing, Failed, Manual, or not yet started. Click Install on a card, or Install all to run them one after another. Agents with more than one install method (npm versus Homebrew, for example) carry a method switcher; switching methods clears any error from the previous attempt. If an install fails, expand Show error log for the stderr output, or copy the manual command from the card.
Some install commands are never run for you: anything that pipes a remote script into a
shell, and anything needing sudo. Those show as Manual with the
command to copy.
The launcher
Agents, panels, and recipes all start from one searchable launcher. It has two triggers that open the same list: the + button in the toolbar, which creates panels in the grid, and the + at the end of the dock, which creates them in the dock. The inventory and every row are identical; only the destination differs.
With the search box empty, the launcher browses in bands:
- Recently launched, Pinned, and Other for agents. Pinned means pinned to the toolbar; the rest fall under Other.
- Open in grid / Open in dock for panels: Terminal, Browse files, Browser, Dev preview, and any panel kind a plugin registers.
- Launch recipe for your saved recipes, with their scope shown on the right.
- More, holding Create a recipe, Set up agents, and Manage agents.
Type anything and the bands collapse into a single ranked Search results list. An agent that isn't installed still appears, marked and explained, rather than being silently dropped.
When Daintree spots an agent CLI on your PATH that you haven't seen before, the toolbar's + wears a small blue discovery dot and its accessible name changes to Launcher: new agents detected. The dot holds off while the Installed agents found card is on screen, so the two don't compete for your attention.
Getting Started checklist
A short checklist tracks the core Daintree workflows. It shows up in two places:
- Inline on the Welcome Screen. The counter starts at 1/5, because installing Daintree counts as the first item and is already checked for you.
- Floating panel pinned to the bottom-right corner once a project is open. Its counter runs 0/4 through 4/4 over the four workflow items below.
The four workflow items are the same in both places:
- Open your project: "Connect a local folder; everything else flows from here." Clicking it opens the folder picker.
- Ask AI to help with your code: "Agents can write code, fix bugs, and answer questions about your codebase." Clicking it opens the panel palette.
- Start a parallel task: "Work on two things at once without switching branches." Clicking it opens the create worktree dialog.
- Run two agents in parallel: "Kick off a second agent while the first keeps working; that's the Daintree superpower." Clicking it opens the panel palette again, since a second agent is a second panel, not a second worktree.
Items tick themselves off as you do the matching action, so you never check anything by hand. Each check badge fills accent green with a small pop as it completes. The floating panel stays accent-tinted while there's work left and goes neutral once you're done; the counter switches to accent only at the final All set state.
When all four are done, a short burst of confetti fires from the panel. With reduced motion turned on, you get a single success-tinted flash instead of particles. The checklist doesn't close itself when you finish, so you decide whether to leave it up or put it away.
Keyboard shortcut tips
Daintree teaches its shortcuts as you go. Hover over a control for a moment, or tab to it with the keyboard, and a small chip appears naming the action and its shortcut, for example Command Palette with Shift-Command-P Control-Shift-P Control-Shift-P . It shows up before you've used the action and steps back once you know it, so it's there when it helps and quiet when it doesn't. For the full reference and how to customize bindings, see Keyboard Shortcuts.