Kadro
02Docs · Getting started

Getting started with Kadro

Last updated · 2026-05-16

This page walks through the first five minutes inside Kadro: signing in, starting the Pro trial if your account doesn’t already have access, creating a workspace, spawning a pane, and sending your first prompt. It assumes you already have the app on your machine. If you don’t, start with Install.

1. Sign in

The first screen on a fresh install is the sign-in gate. Kadro doesn’t embed a sign-in form — authentication happens in your system browser, against kadrotools.ai, using a PKCE flow.

  1. Click Sign in with Browser, or Create accountif you don’t have one yet. The gate shows “Opening browser” while it hands off.
  2. Your default browser opens at the desktop login page. Finish sign-in or sign-up there.
  3. When the browser is done, it deep-links back into Kadro through kadro://auth/callback. The sign-in gate clears and the app continues.

If the browser flow completes but the app stays stuck on “Browser sign-in started”, see the relevant section in Troubleshooting.

2. Start the 14-day trial

After sign-in, Kadro syncs your entitlements from the website. If your account has an active Pro subscription or a running Teams trial, you land in the app immediately. If not, Kadro shows a subscription gate with two browser links:

  • Open pricing — sends you to /pricingin your browser. The 14-day free trial doesn’t require a credit card.
  • Account billing — sends you to /account if you already pay and just need to reactivate.

After you finish in the browser, click Sync access on the same gate. Kadro re-checks the entitlement and lets you in. You can also sign out from this screen if you signed in with the wrong account.

3. Create your first workspace

Kadro’s primary surface is a workspace: a single window split into panes that can each be an agent CLI, a raw shell, or a browser. A new install starts with no workspaces, so the first thing to do is create one.

  1. Press ⌘ K to open the command palette. Type new workspace and run it. You can also use the New Workspace entry in the sidebar.
  2. Pick a layout blueprint (a preset grid) or a custom grid. A workspace can hold between one and sixteen panes.
  3. Choose the project directory. This becomes the working directory each pane spawns into.

The new workspace opens with empty pane slots ready to be filled.

4. Spawn your first pane

Each empty slot offers a provider picker. Pick one of:

  • Shell— a raw terminal in your default shell, in the workspace’s project directory.
  • Claude Code — launches the claude CLI if it’s on your PATH (npm i -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code).
  • Codex CLI — launches codex (npm i -g @openai/codex).
  • Gemini CLI — launches gemini (npm i -g @google/gemini-cli).

If a CLI isn’t detected on your PATH, Kadro shows the install command in the provider row inside Settings → Providers. Detection is a stat-only check on the binary; Kadro does not run --versionor read CLI auth files. Sign-in for each provider happens inside the pane through that CLI’s own OAuth flow.

5. Send your first prompt

Once an agent pane is running, type a prompt at the CLI’s prompt line just as you would in a terminal. The pane uses xterm.js with WebGL rendering, and full-screen TUI agents render through a tui-replace mode so alternate-screen tools stay usable.

A few first-prompt habits worth picking up:

  • Drag a file from Finder into a focused pane to insert the path as a shell-escaped token at the cursor.
  • Right-click a pane header for split, duplicate, rename, fullscreen, copy cwd, reveal cwd in Finder, clear scrollback, and close.
  • ⌘ K stays available everywhere — use it to jump between panes (@ prefix) or workspaces (# prefix), or to run actions (> prefix).

6. Settings worth visiting once

Open Settings from the sidebar profile row. The tabs map to focused, small surfaces:

  • General — default shell.
  • Account — current plan, sync, sign out.
  • Appearance — theme picker (seven dark themes differentiated by ink undertone).
  • Providers — which agent CLIs Kadro can see on your PATH, with install commands for the ones it can’t.
  • Keybindings — override any default shortcut.
  • Privacy — crash diagnostics. Off by default. If you turn it on, Kadro begins sending anonymized error reports from that point forward; turning it back off stops new events from the UI immediately.

Where to go next

  • Docs home — the long-form tour of workspaces, panes, providers, Teams, the command palette, and the browser sidebar.
  • Troubleshooting — common problems and their actual fixes.
  • Changelog — what shipped in each release.