Settings

Settings

Open Settings from the gear at the bottom of the sidebar › Settings…, or press Ctrl+, (outside a terminal). It takes the terminal side's place; your sessions keep running behind it. Close it with ✕ or Esc, or by picking a session.

Settings has two pages, General and Status bar. Agents and Island are listed in the nav but greyed out: they're coming later.

The UI is SettingsPane.xaml(.cs). Defaults are in ClayoSettings.cs.

General

"How Clayo starts and what the window's close button does."

Start at login

Label	Start at login
Says	"Clayo starts hidden; the island greets you."
Default	On, once the installed (Release) Clayo has run
Stored in	Not in settings.json: the Clayo value under HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run, set to "<path to clayo.exe>" --background

At login Clayo starts with no window. Only the island is there, and it waves once. The window opens when you click the island or launch clayo.

• The same switch is in the gear menu and the island's right-click menu as Start at login.
• A Release Clayo rewrites the Run value on every start, so it follows the exe if you publish somewhere new.
• Turning it off removes the value and leaves a marker file, %LOCALAPPDATA%\Clayo\no-login-start, so the next start doesn't write it back. Turning it on again deletes the marker.
• In a Debug build the switch shows what the installed Clayo set but can't be changed: "Only the installed Clayo can change this." (LoginStartup.CanWrite).

Close button

Not a switch, a note: "Closing the window keeps sessions running. Quit Clayo from the gear menu or the island to end them."

Coming later

Shown with a "Later" tag, not working yet:

Label	Says
Agents	"Claude Code and Codex: which ones Clayo can start, and their defaults."
Island	"Where it sits, what it announces, how long notices stay."

Status bar

"Live session info drawn by Clayo itself, not the terminal. Colours follow how full each limit is." See Status Bar and Limits for what each field shows.

Theme

Label	Choices	Default	Key
Theme: "How the numbers are drawn, in the pane header and the sidebar footer."	Numbers, Bars, Rings, Chips	Numbers	theme

Where it shows

Label	Says	Default	Key
Show in the pane header	"Model, branch, context and effort beside the session title."	On	statusHeader
Show limits in the sidebar footer	"The 5-hour and 7-day limits are account-wide, so they sit above New session. Off moves them into the pane header."	On	statusFooter

Fields

Ticks, in two groups:

Group	Label	Default	Key
Per session	Model	On	statusModel
Per session	Branch and diff	On	statusBranch
Per session	Context used	On	statusContext
Per session	Effort	On	statusEffort
Account	5-hour limit	On	statusFiveHour
Account	7-day limit	On	statusSevenDay

A tick whose every placement is off keeps its state but greys out, and the group says why:

• Per session, with the pane header off: "Pane header is off".
• Account, with the footer off: "Shown in the pane header while the footer is off".
• Account, with both off: "Both placements are off".

Reserve

Label	Says	Choices	Default	Key
Warn near a limit	"Past this much of a limit, the island says so once and the limit turns red. Prompts still go through."	Off, 70%, 80%, 90%	Off	reserveAt (0 is off)
5-hour limit	Watch the 5-hour limit	On, off	On	reserveFiveHour
7-day limit	Watch the 7-day limit	On, off	On	reserveSevenDay

The two ticks are greyed out while the threshold is Off.

Where settings are stored

Everything on the Status bar page is saved as you change it, to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Clayo\settings.json:

{
  "statusHeader": true,
  "statusFooter": true,
  "statusModel": true,
  "statusBranch": true,
  "statusContext": true,
  "statusEffort": true,
  "statusFiveHour": true,
  "statusSevenDay": true,
  "reserveAt": 0,
  "reserveFiveHour": true,
  "reserveSevenDay": true,
  "theme": "numbers"
}

• Each key is read on its own. A missing key, a value of the wrong type, a reserveAt other than 0, 70, 80 or 90, or a theme that isn't one of the four falls back to that key's default. Unknown keys are ignored.
• A missing, unreadable or broken file means all defaults. Settings are never a reason for Clayo not to start.
• The file is written beside itself and swapped in, so a crash mid-write loses nothing.

Start at login is the exception: it lives in the Run key, as above.

The sidebar's Group and Sort choices are not saved. They reset to Group: Folder and Newest each time Clayo starts.