Quickstart

Five minutes from nothing to seeing your first archived chat as a markdown file on disk.

1. Install the desktop app

On Linux or macOS:

curl -fsSL https://kept.work/install.sh | bash

On Windows (PowerShell):

irm https://kept.work/install.ps1 | iex

This detects your platform, fetches the right build from GitHub Releases, and registers the MCP server with any Claude Code or OpenClaw install it finds. If you'd rather pick a specific build by hand, see Install.

2. Sideload the Chrome extension

The extension isn't on the Web Store yet, so loading it unpacked is the path. The desktop app ships a copy you can extract:

Open Kept → Settings → Extension → Open extension folder.
Go to chrome://extensions and toggle Developer mode on.
Click Load unpacked and pick the folder Kept opened.

The Kept icon should appear in your toolbar. If it doesn't, see Troubleshooting.

3. Type `@kept` in any supported chat

Open ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, or Kimi. Start typing in the message box. Type @kept and a small palette appears over the trigger. Pick Save current conversation.

4. Look at your filesystem

$ ls ~/.kept/vault
chatgpt/  claude/  gemini/  grok/  kimi/

$ ls ~/.kept/vault/claude
2026-04-24-rls-rollout.md   2026-04-21-tauri-migration.md

That's it. Each file is plain markdown with a YAML frontmatter header. Open it in any editor; ripgrep across the whole vault; index it with anything that reads markdown.

What to do next

Capture chats — extension setup details, auto-sync, what gets saved
Search & recall — full-text + semantic search over the archive
MCP server — plug Kept into Claude Desktop, Cursor, Cline
How it works — what runs locally, what doesn't, how the extension reads each platform