Quickstart
Running mercury in a folder opens Mercury's interactive interface, and that folder is the project.
Install Mercury with one command for your platform (curl, PowerShell, Homebrew, npm, bun or mise) on the Install and update page; a release installation requires git and bundles its own Node runtime and ripgrep.
Check the installation
Open a new terminal, or run the PATH line the shell installer prints, then run mercury --version to print the installed version. In Windows PowerShell, and after a Homebrew, npm, bun or mise install (or when ~/.local/bin is already on PATH), mercury works in the same terminal immediately.
Start the first session
- Open a terminal in the project folder and run
mercury. - Choose an appearance (
True Black,Oasis darkorBlack and white; see Using Mercury). - Sign in to a provider from the scrolling provider list, or press
s(or chooseSign in later to look around, which counts any local models it found and opens the model picker on the home screen when a local server has a model, or points to/localsetupwhen none is running) to skip to Guardrails. When a provider key in your environment already signs a provider in, this step is skipped. - Read the Guardrails step and continue; it reminds you to check Mercury's edits and commands and that files it reads can carry instructions for the model.
- In Terminal.app, the VS Code family, Alacritty or Zed, answer the Terminal keys step, which can configure newline keybindings in the terminal's own settings (on macOS Terminal.app, it sets
Option+Enterfor a newline and silences the terminal bell across every profile, taking effect after restarting Terminal.app; in the VS Code family, Alacritty and Zed, it writesShift+Enterfor a newline). It is off unless you choose it, and a backup is kept. - Accept the workspace trust dialog (see Workspace trust and permissions).
- Select New Session on the home screen and press
Enter.
Mercury creates a blank session for the folder on your default model and opens its chat.