How to Install Dhito with Homebrew

If you manage your Mac from the terminal, dragging a disk image into a folder feels like a step backwards. Dhito is now installable with Homebrew, so it can go into the same scripted, reproducible setup as the rest of your tooling.

Install Dhito in two commands

brew tap dhito-app/tap
brew install --cask dhito

That is the whole process. The first command tells Homebrew where to find our cask definition; the second downloads, verifies, and installs the app into /Applications. Launch it from Spotlight, Raycast, or open -a dhito and you are ready to index your first folder.

If you keep your machine setup in a Brewfile, add this line and Dhito will be installed on every machine you provision:

cask "dhito"

Don't have Homebrew yet?

Homebrew is the de facto package manager for macOS. If brew --version returns "command not found", install it first with the official one-liner from brew.sh:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

On Apple Silicon, Homebrew installs to /opt/homebrew. The installer prints two commands at the end that add brew to your PATH — run them, or your shell will not find brew in a new terminal window.

What Homebrew actually verifies

This is the part worth understanding, because "curl a binary from the internet" and "install a Homebrew cask" are not the same risk.

Our cask pins the exact SHA-256 checksum of the release DMG. Homebrew downloads the file, hashes it, and compares it against that pinned value before it mounts anything. If the download is truncated, corrupted in transit, or altered on the server, the checksum will not match and the install aborts. You do not have to notice the problem yourself.

On top of that, the DMG and the app inside it are code-signed with our Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple, with the notarization ticket stapled to the bundle. That means macOS Gatekeeper can verify the app is from us and has been scanned by Apple, even with no network connection. You can confirm this yourself before trusting it:

spctl -a -vvv -t install /Applications/dhito.app

A healthy install reports accepted and source=Notarized Developer ID. This is a check you can run against any app on your Mac, not just ours, and it is a good habit.

Requirements

The cask declares its requirements, so Homebrew will stop with a clear message rather than installing something that cannot run:

• Apple Silicon required. Dhito ships as an arm64 binary built for the M-series Neural Engine. It does not run on Intel Macs.
• macOS 13 Ventura or later.
• Roughly 2 GB of disk space for the app and its bundled local AI models, plus room for the index it builds.

Keeping Dhito up to date

Dhito has a built-in updater and updates itself in place, so the cask is marked auto_updates true. In practice that means you do not need to do anything — the app will tell you when a new version is available.

If you would rather drive updates from the terminal, this still works:

brew upgrade --cask dhito

Because the app can update itself between Homebrew bumps, brew list --versions may occasionally show an older version than the one actually running. The app's own About panel is the authoritative answer.

Uninstalling cleanly

Removing the app is what you would expect:

brew uninstall --cask dhito

That deletes the application but deliberately leaves your search index in place, so that reinstalling does not force your Mac to spend hours re-indexing and re-transcribing everything from scratch.

When you genuinely want it all gone — index, cached models, preferences — use --zap:

brew uninstall --zap --cask dhito

That clears ~/Library/Application Support/com.dhito.app along with the app's caches and preferences. Since every one of those files was generated on your machine and never left it, uninstalling Dhito really is the end of the story — there is no server-side copy of your index to request the deletion of.

Why we ship our own tap instead of the main repository

A fair question, and the honest answer is that we do not qualify yet.

Homebrew's official cask repository applies a notability requirement to software from independent developers — roughly, a project needs an established audience before maintainers will take on the burden of carrying it. Dhito does not clear that bar today, so submitting the cask upstream would simply get it closed.

A tap is the supported answer to exactly this situation. It needs nobody's approval, it gives you the same brew install and brew upgrade workflow, and the only visible difference is the one-time brew tap command. When Dhito does clear the notability bar, we will submit the same cask upstream and keep the tap working so that nobody's existing install breaks.

Troubleshooting

"Cask 'dhito' is unavailable"

The tap has not been added, or your local Homebrew metadata is stale:

brew tap dhito-app/tap
brew update

"Dhito depends on arm64 architecture"

You are on an Intel Mac. Dhito requires Apple Silicon — the local models are built against the M-series Neural Engine, and an arm64 binary cannot be translated by Rosetta.

The download is large and appears to stall

The DMG is around 575 MB because the local AI models ship inside it rather than being downloaded from a server on first launch. That is a deliberate trade: a bigger one-time download in exchange for an app that works fully offline from the moment it opens. If a download fails partway, brew fetch --cask dhito will retry it without installing.

Verifying what you installed

To see exactly where the cask came from, what version is installed, and what it will remove on zap:

brew info --cask dhito

Why any of this matters

Dhito exists because searching your own files should not require uploading them to somebody else's computer. Installing through Homebrew fits the same principle: a definition you can read, a checksum you can verify, and an uninstall that genuinely removes everything. Nothing about the process asks you to trust a claim you cannot check yourself.

If you have not tried it yet, install Dhito and point it at a folder you have given up on organizing. Searching it by description rather than by filename tends to be the moment it clicks.