RAG Desk Support

Questions, problems or feedback? Email Support E-Mail. Please include your macOS version and, if something went wrong, the message RAG Desk showed.

Getting started

  1. Open Settings (RAG Desk menu › Settings, or ⌘,) and paste your OpenAI API key. It is stored in your Mac's Keychain.
  2. In the Indexing tab, click + to create a data pool, then “Add Folder…” to choose the folders to index.
  3. Click “Start Indexing”. The first time, RAG Desk asks whether it may send content to OpenAI and lists what it sends.
  4. In the Execution tab, select the pool, type a question and press Return. Switch on “System Prompt” for a written answer with citations.

Frequently asked questions

What do I need?

A Mac with Apple silicon and macOS 26.3 or later, and an API key from your own OpenAI account. OpenAI bills API usage to that account.

What does indexing cost?

After every indexing run, the Result section shows how many documents, chunks and tokens were processed and an estimate of the cost. Contextual Retrieval and Semantic chunking call a language model and cost the most. Re-indexing an unchanged pool costs nothing, because only new and changed files are processed.

Which files can RAG Desk read?

PDF (including scanned pages), DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, RTF, HTML, EPUB, CSV, TSV and EML files, Markdown, plain text, reStructuredText, Org, LaTeX and AsciiDoc. Other files in a folder are skipped. Pages, Keynote and Numbers documents and older .doc, .ppt and .xls files are listed after the run with a note on which format to export them to.

A folder says “Unavailable”.

macOS no longer lets RAG Desk open it, usually because it was moved, renamed or is on a disk that isn't connected. Add the folder again with “Add Folder…”. Everything already indexed from it is kept until then.

Why does changing the embedding model need a rebuild?

Vectors made by two different models can't be compared, so a pool's index has to be built again from scratch with the new model. Click “Rebuild Index…” in the Embeddings section.

Scanned PDFs come back empty.

Make sure “Read scanned PDFs” is switched on for the pool. Text recognition runs on your Mac and reads printed text; handwriting is not read reliably.

How do I stop RAG Desk from sending anything to OpenAI?

Switch off “Allow sending content to OpenAI” in Settings › Privacy. Keyword search without an answer keeps working on pools that are already indexed. See the privacy policy for what is sent and when.

How do I delete my data?

Delete a pool in the Indexing tab (right-click it, then Delete Pool) to remove its index, and remove the API key in Settings before you delete the app. macOS may keep the app's data folder, ~/Library/Containers/de.develop.tz.ragdesk, after the app is deleted; if it is still there, delete it as well. Your documents are never changed.