Settings and languages

Settings and languages

Settings is the sliders icon in the header.

Setting	What it does
Language	en, it, fr, es, and anything you add
Theme	dark, light, or follow the system
Show hidden files	dotfiles, in every pane
File sidebar	a persistent pane on the left — wide screens only
Split file panes	two folders side by side
Tree view	expand folders in place instead of navigating into them
Wrap long lines	the default when previewing a text file
Open files inside the desk	a file opened from a window becomes a window
Terminal font size	applied the next time a session opens
tmux configuration	edit ~/.tmux.conf and hand it to every session
Open on another device	a QR code with the address and the token

Getting to one of them

The screen has grown to nine groups and forty-odd rows, and the way to a setting was to scroll and read headings. Two things fix that, and neither is a redesign:

• The headings are chips at the top. Press one and you are at that group. They are built from the finished page rather than from a list kept beside it, so a group added next month appears up there without anybody remembering to add it.
• A box that hides what does not match. Type pdf, or token, or enter, and what is left is the rows that say it — with any heading left holding nothing hidden too.

Nine groups, not one list

Settings is grouped by the question you arrived with rather than by the order things were built:

Go to	the keyboard list, the tmux configuration, prompts and placeholders, the QR code for another device, and the language. Not settings — doors. They are first because three of them are why people open this screen.
Look	the theme.
Files	hidden files, the sidebar, split panes, tree view, whether a file opened from a desk stays in the desk.
Documents	line wrapping, which viewer each extension gets, which PDF viewer, and how a PDF you have not read before opens.
Interruptions	the sound, and the one button that wires your agents to ring.
Placeholders	how one is written, whether typing one in a session expands it, whether a prompt may take a value from another set.
Sending	the pause before the Enter that follows a prompt, and a switch for pressing it twice.
Sessions	the key bar under a session, and letting your agents say which folder they are in.
Devices	a token per device, when it was last used, and revoking one on its own. Only visible to the token from the config.
This copy	the version, whether a newer one exists, and emptying the journal.

The pause before the Enter

A prompt is written into the session and the return follows it as a separate write, a moment later. That gap is the setting, and it exists because an input box does not read lines, it reads writes: a box that gathers a paste takes everything arriving in one read as part of the paste, so a return sent along with the text lands in the box and the prompt sits there, complete and unsent.

Half a second suits every agent tried here. Nothing is lost by making it longer — the text is already in front of the agent — and Press Enter twice is there as a last resort for a box that still will not take it. It is off, and worth leaving off: a return pressed a second time is also a return pressed on whatever dialog the first one opened.

The key bar under a session

Esc, Tab, the arrows and the control codes a touch keyboard cannot send. The device decides by default — a coarse pointer gets it, a mouse does not — and the two other settings are for what a media query cannot see: a laptop with a touchscreen you drive with the trackpad, and a tablet with a keyboard on it.

Letting your agents say where they are

The same bargain as the bell, for a different fact: it writes a status line hook into Claude Code's own configuration, and from then on every turn tells Argus which folder that agent considers current. Only Claude Code can — Codex has no equivalent and is listed as unable rather than offered a switch that does nothing. See What each agent can do.

How often System reads

/api/system every four seconds while the screen is in front of you, and nothing at all while the tab is in the background. The row over the readings — 4s · 15s · 1m · 5m · manual — is remembered, with a button to read again and how old the reading is, which matters most on manual, where that line is the only thing telling you the age of the numbers you are looking at.

Emptying the journal

This copy → Clear the journal, with a choice of how much: everything, or only what is older than a day, two days, or a week. It says how many entries went. The journal is what tells you whether anybody has been in, so it is deliberately not something that empties itself on a schedule you forgot you set — see Security.

Which PDF viewer

Argus draws PDFs itself, with pdf.js, and that is what makes the page you left off at come back, page width survive a reload, and finding text work at all — a browser's own viewer answers "loaded" and then says nothing while you scroll, and silently ignores half the parameters you give it.

It is not free: it draws every page. On a long document, on a slow phone, the browser's own viewer is faster, and some people simply prefer it. So it is a choice — Documents → PDF viewer. The browser's gets the fit you asked for and the page you had reached, which is as much as it will take.

Adding a language

A catalogue is a flat JSON object whose keys are the English strings:

{
  "code": "de",
  "name": "Deutsch",
  "strings": { "Settings": "Einstellungen", "Files": "Dateien" }
}

Translating it needs no tooling and no knowledge of the code, a missing entry falls back to English rather than showing a blank, and the source keeps saying what it means. Import it from Settings → Language, or drop the file into ~/.config/argus/lang/. A file you add wins over a built-in with the same code, which is how you fix a translation you disagree with.