Interface

Under Settings → Interface, plus the two or three things that are not settings at all.

Themes

Two choices, not one. Mode is System, Light or Dark. Style is one of six palettes: Classic, Dracula, Catppuccin, Gruvbox, Nord, Solarized.

Every style carries its own light and dark ramp, so picking Gruvbox does not commit you to a dark app, and following the system does not commit you to Classic. The swatches in the picker show both ramps whatever mode is selected.

The strip the operating system draws around the app (the status bar on a phone, the title bar of an installed window) follows the theme too.

Translucent surfaces is the switch below. The sidebar, the bars and the floating cards let what is behind them show through, blurred, and the slider sets how much: left is glass, more see-through and barely blurred; right is tint, denser and heavily blurred. The two always move together, because transparency without blur leaves two texts fighting and blur without transparency is just paint. Turning it off makes every surface flat and opaque, which is easier to read and cheaper to draw on a slow machine. If your system asks for reduced transparency, that wins whatever is set here.

Four levels move together, and the sidebar is where three of them meet: its top bar and its footer are the densest, its search, tabs and conversation list sit one step lighter, and the conversation beside them is lighter still. That is what gives the column depth instead of one flat sheet of glass, and it is also why the picture behind the app reads in the conversation rather than across the whole thing.

A theme for the whole instance

In server mode an admin can hand their users the theme they are using, under Settings → Admin → Theme:

• Overridable decides what an account starts on. The first time someone picks a theme of their own, the offer stops applying to them.
• Locked fixes it, and the theme controls disappear from Settings → Interface rather than being drawn and refused. An instance with a house style has made a decision, and a disabled row of colours only invites the question.

Nobody’s stored preference is rewritten either way, so unlocking gives everyone their own back.

Background

A picture behind the app, under Settings → Interface → Background. The sidebar is translucent, so it reads through the column; the conversation stays opaque, so nothing is ever asked to be read off a photograph; the margin around both shows it plainly.

Eight are shipped with the app, in a row you scroll sideways. They are gradients rather than photographs, which is why they weigh nothing, never look soft on a large display, and cost a dozen bytes to store: the setting keeps their name, not their pixels.

Your own picture goes in from the button under the row, and then joins the row as a tile like any other. That one is kept with your settings, which travel, so it is capped at 3 MB, and a file over the limit is refused rather than quietly resized.

Background blur is the slider below, on its own axis rather than following the transparency one. The picture is softened before anything is drawn on top of it, which is what keeps text legible over a busy photograph. The middle of the track is the default and is marked, so it can be found again; left of it the picture is left as it is, right of it it turns to colour and light.

Home screen

Four independent pieces, each with its own switch:

• the greeting header,
• prompt suggestions,
• recent personas, with a count,
• recent conversations, with a count.

Turn all four off and the home screen is a composer and nothing else, which is a legitimate way to use it.

Messages

• Floating conversation bar. On by default: the bar at the top of a conversation is a pill hovering over it, matching the composer at the other end, and the text passes around both. Turn it off and it goes back to being the top edge of the column, flat against the sidebar’s own bar, where a background image reaches it. Either way it keeps the same height, so the two columns still line up.
• Tint your messages with the accent colour, so your turns read as a bubble against the assistant’s plain prose.
• Timestamps under each message.
• Fade messages a summary has replaced. On by default, so it is visible at a glance where the live context begins after a compaction. Hovering a faded message brings it back to full strength. If the effect bothers you, this is the switch.

Sidebar

Conversations, and optionally the personas you have talked to, pinned above them. Pinned means pinned: they hold their place in the header in both shapes, so they never scroll out of reach. If they take more room than you want, that is what the pin switch and the compact header are for.

Use the compact header trades the labels for room: New chat moves onto the search row as an icon, and the persona grid becomes a row of avatars.

The search field carries the Ctrl/Cmd + K hint, which opens the full-text search over every conversation rather than filtering the titles in place.

A persona’s conversation shows its avatar in the list, so it is recognisable even with the pinned launchers turned off.

Collapsed, the sidebar becomes a one-lane rail: new chat and search, the two sections, your pinned personas, and the four conversations you were in most recently, each as a single letter with its name on hover. The button under them opens the rest of the list, with titles, without having to expand the column for a single visit. The mark stays at the top, at the size it has at full width, and the control that widens the column again sits astride the column’s edge, half on it and half off it.

Right-click any conversation (long press on a touch screen) for the full menu: pin it, archive it, save it as knowledge, copy it as Markdown or JSON, delete it. Deleting always asks, and asks on the row itself rather than in a dialog somewhere else.

A persona’s launcher answers the same right-click, with everything a conversation offers plus one entry only it has: End this conversation. That is not deletion and does not read as one. Ending it puts the persona back to unstarted and leaves the transcript in the list as an ordinary conversation; deleting is the entry below, and it is the only one that loses anything.

Every message carries its own actions under it: retry, edit if it is yours, copy, and delete. Deleting takes that one turn and nothing else. A question deleted does not take its answer with it, because sometimes the answer is the part worth keeping. It asks first, on the message itself, and the confirmation replaces the icon it was asked from so nothing in the thread moves while it waits.

Archive

The middle answer between a conversation in the way and a conversation gone. Archiving takes it out of the list and keeps everything: the messages, the model, the settings, the persona it belonged to.

Archived conversations are reached from a link at the foot of the list, which appears only once there is something in it. Each one can be restored or deleted from there, and the whole archive can be restored or emptied at once. Nothing else in the app shows them: they are not a group at the bottom of the sidebar, because being out of the way is the whole point.

The same pin and delete can sit on every row instead, one click closer: Settings → Interface → Sidebar → Show quick actions. They are off by default, because they hover over the title on a narrow sidebar and put delete one slip away from the conversation you meant to open.

Languages

English and French. A key missing from a translation falls back to English rather than rendering blank, so a partial translation degrades into a readable app instead of an empty one.

The interface is translated. The documentation is not, and neither is the source. See Translations if you want to add a language.

Profile

Your name, avatar and colour, under Settings → Profile. In server mode a profile provisioned by OIDC is read-only: the identity provider owns those fields.

On a phone

The app is responsive: dialogs go full screen below a certain width, the sidebar collapses, and the composer’s menus become sheets. That is the default, and it is unchanged.

There is also a second interface, built for a phone rather than folded down to fit one. Switch it on in Settings, Chat, Simplified mobile interface. It is marked alpha and it means it.

One column, a tab bar at the foot where a thumb already is, and the microphone set apart on the left because talking is what it is for rather than one destination among four. The conversation rises as a sheet from the bottom of the screen with the model and the way back on the page above it.

It is offered to phones and to nothing else. A tablet or a desktop gets the responsive interface whatever the setting says, and a window widened past a phone hands you back to it: one column with a floating bar on a wide screen is the wrong product, not a smaller one.

Nothing is duplicated underneath. The same conversation engine, the same message rendering, the same settings and the same account: what the second interface adds is an arrangement.

Speaking rather than typing is its own subject, dictation on any screen and a hands-free loop on this one: Voice.