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Tinker
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Your first connection

From an empty workspace to a table on screen in under a minute.

The first launch. Three ways in, one click each, with what Tinker promises about passwords and writes beneath them.

A new install, with no connections yet, opens on a welcome window with three ways in: connect to a PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB or Redis server, open a SQLite file, or restore the connections backed up on another Mac. Beneath them are what Tinker promises — passwords stay in the Keychain, every change is shown as SQL first, production asks before it writes — and a switch that keeps crash reports on this Mac, never sent. It shows once, and only while there are no connections.

Adding a connection

The connection editor. Name, engine, host, user, password and database, then colour, group and safety toggles.
  1. Press New at the bottom of the sidebar, or ⌘K and type New Connection.
  2. Pick the engine. Every engine is added through this one sheet, Redis included. The port defaults per engine: 5432 for PostgreSQL, 3306 for MySQL and MariaDB, 6379 for Redis. SQLite asks for a file instead, and the four steps below about host, password and connection stages do not apply to it.
  3. Fill in host, user and password. The password is stored in the macOS Keychain; there is no option to store it anywhere else.
  4. Give the connection a colour and a group. The colour becomes a stripe on every tab that belongs to it.
  5. Press Test Connection. The log reports each stage: DNS, TCP, SSH, TLS, auth. A failure names the stage and quotes the server.
  6. Save. Double-click the connection in the sidebar to connect and expand it.

Around the workspace

Sidebar on the left, tabs across the top, the grid in the middle, pager and status bar at the bottom.
  • Sidebar — groups, connections, databases, schemas (PostgreSQL), then tables, views and functions. The filter field (⌘⇧O) fuzzy-matches table names across every connected database.
  • Tabs — each tab is either a Table tab or a Query tab and belongs to one connection. Drag to reorder, middle-click to close, ⌘1–9 to select.
  • Status bar — connection, database, whether the transport is encrypted (or “Local file”, for a SQLite database read in-process), the row range, elapsed time and transaction state.
  • Windows — ⌘N opens another workspace. Sessions are shared across windows: one session per connection, app-wide.

The command palette

⌘K lists every action, table and connection. Everything in it also lives in a menu with the same shortcut.
Tip
Double-click a database or schema, rather than a table, to open the Objects tab and survey everything it holds at once.