Change Merrimo settings on Mac
Choose Merrimo > Settings (or press ⌘,) to change your account, the canvas, how dictation behaves, your AI providers and models, the machines renders run on, and to see what AI has cost you. Panes are listed in the sidebar: Account, Canvas, Behaviors and Advanced, then, under AI, Providers, Image & Video, Rendering, Usage and External Agents. Image & Video and Rendering are hidden while Use AI is off.
Choose Merrimo > Settings (or press ⌘,) to change your account, the canvas, how dictation behaves, your AI providers and models, and to see what AI has cost you. Panes are listed in the sidebar: Account, Canvas, Behaviors and Advanced, then, under AI, Providers, Image & Video and Usage. Image & Video is hidden while Use AI is off.
Account
Your picture, name and email are at the top. Click Choose Picture… to pick a picture, or the trash button to remove it. Type in Display Name and press Return, or click elsewhere, to save it: people you share stories with see this name. Log Out… returns you to the sign-in screen on this Mac, and Delete Account… removes your account and the stories only you own. Images and files you uploaded are deleted within a month, except those still used in stories other people keep.
Canvas
Turn on Auto-hide the insert tray to keep the tray of panels, balloons and captions out of sight until you rest the pointer at the top of the canvas’s right edge, where it slides out.
Under Panel Prompts, Enhance short prompts (on at first) has the AI add detail to a short prompt you type on a panel before it renders. Word limit sets how short: prompts with fewer words than this are enhanced (15 at first). Drag across the number, type one, or use its arrows. It needs an AI model set up in Settings > Providers.
Under Generate Tray, choose what the tray under a picture holds while the inspector is closed. Pick a kind of subject in Tray for, then drag items from the palette into its tray or out of it. Restore Default Set puts back the prompt, the style button and Generate. See Generate again with the inspector closed.
Behaviors
Tidy up dictation (on at first): when you stop dictating to the Agent, Apple Intelligence on your Mac takes out the ums, false starts and repeated words, fixes the punctuation and straightens rambling sentences. Turn it off to keep your words exactly as dictated. It needs Apple Intelligence turned on in System Settings.
Advanced
Switches for features most stories don't need. Turn on Panel status to mark panels Draft, Regen, Demoted or Final: a Final panel is locked against edits, regenerating a chapter keeps its Final and Demoted panels, and Demoted panels are left out when you auto-arrange. While it's off, the status menus and filters are hidden and every panel acts as a draft. The statuses you set are kept, and come back when you turn it on again. It starts off on a new Mac, and on if this Mac already used StoryForge before the switch existed. On iPhone and iPad, it's in Settings > Advanced.
Providers
A provider is where Merrimo sends AI requests: OpenRouter, a service you pay with your own API key (Anthropic, OpenAI or Google), or a model server you run, such as LM Studio or Ollama. Use AI turns AI on or off across the app; while it's off, chat and image generation are hidden.
- Click + next to Your Providers to add one: choose OpenRouter, your own API key or a model server, and follow the steps. See Set up AI in Merrimo on Mac.
- The Active provider is used for every task by default. Click Make Active on another row to switch.
- Click a provider to open its page: change its Default Model, replace its API key, test a model server, or remove it under Connection. Click the back button to return.
- If you remove the Active provider, Merrimo asks which of the others should write now. Pick one, or click None for Now to leave none Active until you click Make Active on a row.
Choose a model
Clicking Default Model opens the model browser. Search by name or id, narrow the list with the filter chips (such as Free, Reasoning or Vision), and change the order with Sort. Pick a brand in the left column to see its versions, then pick a version to narrow the list further. When every model comes from one brand, as with your own Anthropic, OpenAI or Google key, there is no brand column. The current model is checked, and the footer shows it with its price.
Let the model think first
Models that can reason before they answer, such as recent Claude models, OpenAI's o-series and GPT-5, Gemini 2.5, and Qwen 3 on a model server you run, get a Thinking row on their provider's page. Default leaves it to the model: most cloud models answer straight away, while Claude 5 models and reasoning models on your own model server think first. Pick Off, or Low, Medium or High to set how much it thinks (a model server offers just Off and On; OpenAI's and Google's reasoning models always think, so they have no Off, and a Claude model that can't stop thinking thinks as little as it can on Off). Thinking makes answers slower and uses more tokens. What the model thought shows in the job's Thinking section in the Jobs window.
Image & Video
Image Models are the OpenRouter models shown as circles in the image inspector, next to your workflows. Click the row, then check the models you want. Video Model is the model Video mode generates takes with. Both need an OpenRouter provider.
Rendering
Rendering lists the machines your renders run on, such as This Mac and ComfyUI servers on your network, and which of them collaborators can use. See Set up render machines and ComfyUI on Mac.
Usage
Usage shows the tokens your AI requests used, what they cost and how many projects they were for. Choose All Time, Last 30 Days or This Month from the menu, and use Project or Provider to switch the breakdown. Click a column heading to sort the breakdown by that column, and click it again to reverse the order. Usage outside a project is grouped as No project, which stays last when the table is sorted by name. A dash means that kind of usage never ran, or the provider didn't report a cost.
External Agents
Turn on Allow external AI agents to let an AI app you run yourself, such as Claude Desktop, Claude Code or Cursor, read and edit your stories. Only apps on this Mac can connect. The change takes effect the next time you open Merrimo: click Relaunch Now to reopen it straight away. Then click Copy Setup Prompt and paste the prompt into your agent; it adds Merrimo as an MCP server and checks the connection itself. Keep Merrimo open while the agent works. The agent can also see Merrimo's own windows: it can list them and take a picture of one to check what you see. It can't see other apps, and it can't move or click in a window. To make those pictures exact, allow Merrimo in System Settings > Privacy & Security > Screen & System Audio Recording; without that, Merrimo draws them itself, and glass areas such as the sidebar can come out blank.
An agent can do what you do in Merrimo. For example, it can open History on a panel or character to show you its versions, and step through them the way the image's back and forward arrows do.
On a panel, the agent can choose the view of a place it's drawn from, including a variant of the place for a closer framing, and read back what each panel uses. It can also pick the pose and expression each character is drawn in, generate those poses and expressions, and add the story's own. And it can animate a panel as Animate in the Image controls does, choosing the video engine and the length: the Jobs window shows the video while it renders, and it's saved to the story's Videos.
It can read and change a comic canvas's page setup: the paper size, margins, render size, columns, book spreads, reading direction and grid. It can make art styles of its own, as you do in the Style Browser: it can read any style in full, create, edit and delete the story's custom styles, copy a built-in style to change it, and generate a style's preview.
The agent can export a story too, with every choice File > Export… offers: it sees the same checks first, such as art that may print soft, and the files go to a folder of Merrimo's own, which the agent is told about. For a story you own, it can also do what the Share sheet does: see who the story is shared with, get its invite link, turn the link on or off, invite people by email (they get the same email as when you invite them), and change people's roles or remove them.
It can open a story's window, so you can watch it work in a story it just made, and close that window again; nothing in the story changes when it does. Merrimo asks to come to the front when it opens a window, but your Mac may keep it behind the app you're using until you switch to it. The agent can also tell which version of Merrimo it is talking to, so if two Macs run different versions, it can say which one is missing a feature.
On the comic canvas, the agent can read, make, change and delete your shared styles as the Style Manager does, see which style each balloon or caption wears and the font it's drawn in, and change a letter's font.
The agent can also duplicate a story, move a story you own to the Trash, and put a story back from the Trash, as you can in the library. It can't delete a story for good or empty the Trash: that stays yours to do.
Connected Agents
Choose Connected Agents to see the AI apps you have connected to your stories over the internet, such as Claude or ChatGPT, and to copy the address that connects a new one. Click Disconnect beside an agent to end its access. Connect Claude and ChatGPT has the steps.