Installing Cilevi

There is no installer. Cilevi is a single Cilevi.exe, and running it is installing it.

Put it somewhere it can stay: your Documents folder, or a folder of its own. Running it from the Downloads folder works, but people empty that folder and then wonder where the app went.

What Windows says the first time

SmartScreen may show a blue box saying it protected your PC, with a Run anyway hidden behind More info. This is what Windows shows any program it has not seen many times before. It is about how new the file is, not about what is in it.

If you would rather not see that at all, the Microsoft Store copy of Cilevi is checked by Microsoft and installs without the warning.

What the first run asks

Privacy and terms. You see them once and agree once. They are also in the settings menu afterwards, under Privacy and Terms.

Your name and email. This window has a Skip, and Skip really skips: registering is never required to use Cilevi and the app is not crippled without it. What registering buys you is that a problem report can be answered. The newsletter box next to it starts empty and is a separate question.

A note about the pointer. On the first run you are told that your recordings no longer have the mouse pointer painted into them, because the editor draws a better one over the top. There is a button in that window to put the old behaviour back if you want it. See The pointer for what the drawn one can do.

Where it keeps things

Recordings go to the folder shown in the settings menu, which you can change with Change Output Folder. Settings live in a small settings.ini beside the app. Speech models, if you ever download one for captions, go under %LOCALAPPDATA%\Cilevi\models and deleting them costs nothing but the download.