Settings Reference

Settings Reference

Two settings surfaces, and the rule that explains why a setting you changed on your laptop did not follow you to your phone.

Surface	Scope	Opened from
App Settings	Global, this Codeman install.	The header gear.
Session Options	One session.	The session's tab.

App Settings is a single scrolling document with a rail acting as a table of contents; clicking a rail entry scrolls rather than switching. Session Options genuinely switches panels.

Per-device versus synced

Some settings live on the server and follow you to every device. Others are stored in the browser and stay put. This is deliberate, not an oversight: your phone wants a different font size, a different keyboard bar, and a different set of header buttons than your desktop.

Category	Examples
Per-device, local	Skin, WebGL renderer, local echo, CJK input, extended keyboard bar, File Viewer and Cron header buttons. Never sent to the server at all.
Per-device policy	Most show* toggles, plan usage chip, language. Stored server-side, but a device only takes the server value when it has no local one of its own.
Synced	Models, effort, CLI options, notification preferences, voice settings, display name, the agent skill and approvals toggles.

The practical rule: appearance and input are per device, behaviour is shared. If a change did not follow you, it is in one of the first two rows, and you change it again on that device.

App Settings

Updates

Current version, a manual check, and the in-app updater. Covers git-clone installs supervised by systemd or launchd; npm installs report as non-updatable. See Running As A Service.

Terminal & Input

Setting	Default	Notes
Local Echo	On for touch devices	Paints keystrokes locally and flushes on Enter. See Input And Voice.
CJK Input	Off	IME composition through a dedicated text field.
Extended Keyboard Bar	Per device	Which accessory bar phones get. Shell sessions override it while they are active.
Wheel Scrolls Local History	Off	Keeps the wheel on the local buffer instead of forwarding it to the CLI.
Auto Copy Selection	Off	Copies highlighted terminal text to the clipboard the moment you finish selecting it. Ctrl+C still copies on demand.
WebGL Renderer	On	With a GPU-stall watchdog that falls back to DOM rendering.
Gesture Control	Off	Camera hand tracking. Also needs CODEMAN_GESTURE=1 on the server.

Header & Panels

Chips for every optional header control, with a live preview of the resulting header:

Run, Font Size, System Stats, Redraw Terminal, Response Viewer, Away Digest, Session Manager, Attachments, File Viewer, Multi-monitor, Plan Usage, Lifecycle Log, Monitor, Project Insights, File Browser, Subagents, Approvals Inbox, Read My Mind, Ultracode Agents, Ultracode Windows, Cron.

Most default to off. The stock desktop header is system stats, File Viewer, and the gear. New header controls never appear on phones.

This section also holds background-agent tracking, including whether to track agents for every session or only the active tab.

Appearance

Setting	Notes
Skin	Theme palettes, light ones included. Applied before first paint, so no flash of the wrong theme.
Entrance Animations	Per-surface animation styles for tabs, terminals, windows, and lineage lines. All default to the legacy no-animation behaviour.
Display Name	Your name in the UI. Cosmetic only; it never renames the package, CLI, API, or storage.
Interface Language	English or Simplified Chinese. Per device.
Session List Layout	Header tab strip (default) or a collapsible left sidebar. See The Dashboard.
Tall Tabs	Taller tab strip.
Pop-out Button on Tabs	Adds the detach control to tabs, with a per-tab override.
Spawn Lineage Lines	Arcs from a parent tab to sessions it spawned. Desktop only, on by default.
Overview Home Screen	The phone home screen. On by default.

Models

Claude model cards, the 1M context window switch, and the thinking effort segment. The cards and the switch compose into one model choice, so there is no separate "which one wins" question.

Model and effort are both soft defaults: the model is written into the case's .claude/settings.local.json and effort is passed at start, so /model and /effort inside a session override them at any time.

Agents & CLIs

Setting	Notes
Startup Mode	Claude's permission mode for new sessions. Default skips prompts; auto uses Anthropic's classifier-guarded mode; normal prompts; or give an explicit allowed-tools list.
Allowed Tools	The list used by the explicit mode.
Ralph / Todo Tracker	Enables the Ralph loop surfaces.
Agent Teams	Experimental teams. Also needs the CLI's own environment flag.
Codeman Agent Skill	Injects the agent skill into new Claude sessions per case. Off by default. See Driving Codeman From An Agent.
Remote auto-reconnect	Reattaches dropped remote SSH sessions. On by default.
Nice priority / value	Runs agent processes at a lower CPU priority.
Bypass approvals and sandbox	Pi's project trust. Read Agent CLIs before enabling.
Animated status effects	Cosmetic.

Notifications

Master toggle, browser notifications, push subscription, audio alerts, and the idle threshold that decides when a quiet session counts as needing you. See Notifications And Approvals.

Voice

Active provider and the engine behind it, insert mode, language, domain keywords to bias recognition, the Deepgram API key, and the opt-in switch for transcribing through this server's Claude login, with its live credential status. See Input And Voice.

Shortcuts

Rebinding for the shortcut registry. See Keyboard Shortcuts.

System

CLAUDE.md template for new cases, default working directory, the image watcher, and Cloudflare tunnel controls including the tunnel and upload URLs. In multi-user mode, the Users administration entry is injected here.

Session Options

Per session, from the tab.

Panel	Contains
Respawn	Auto-resume on usage limit, the respawn cycle configuration, presets, duration. See Keeping Agents Running.
Session	Name, working directory, environment overrides, per-tab pop-out override.
Ralph / Todo	Loop configuration, iteration and todo caps, circuit breaker reset. See Autonomous Loops.
Summary	What this session has done: tokens, activity, run summary.

Panels that only make sense for Claude are hidden for other run modes rather than shown and failing.

Environment variables

Some things are configured before the server starts, not in the UI:

Variable	Effect
CODEMAN_PORT	Listen port.
CODEMAN_HOST	Bind address. Loopback by default.
CODEMAN_PASSWORD / CODEMAN_USERNAME	HTTP Basic credentials. Username defaults to admin.
CODEMAN_ALLOWED_HOSTS	Extra Host and Origin allowlist entries for a reverse proxy.
CODEMAN_INSTANCE	Scopes the data directory and tmux socket together. Required for a second instance.
CODEMAN_MULTIUSER	Enables multi-user mode.
CODEMAN_GESTURE	Makes gesture control available to be enabled.
CODEMAN_DOCKER_BRIDGE_HOOKS	Lets in-container hooks reach the host on a loopback bind.
CODEMAN_FILE_PICKER_ROOTS	Extra roots for the path picker.
CODEMAN_ALLOW_UNAUTHENTICATED_NETWORK	Acknowledges exposing the server with no password.

Gotchas

• A setting that did not sync is per device. Change it again on that device.
• The plan usage chip and its telemetry exporter are one setting. Enabling the chip without the exporter would leave it blank forever, so it is deliberately not separable.
• Toggling a header button does nothing on a phone. Phones deliberately ignore most of the header chips.
• Enabling a feature does not retroactively configure existing sessions. The agent skill injection, for instance, applies at session creation.

Read next

• The Dashboard - what each control does once visible.
• Keeping Agents Running - the Respawn panel in depth.
• Agent CLIs - model, effort, and permission modes.