Appearance

Development preview — the settings.json system and the hive config / hive theme commands are on the unreleased development line, as are the plugin pages and per-view toolbar settings described below.

Settings

One user-owned file, validated on read and write; a running app applies changes without a restart:

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/hivemind/settings.json      # $HIVE_SETTINGS overrides the path

Full-window Settings opens from the gear.

Appearance page

Choose a preset and accent. Expand Background to select wallpaper, or Overlays to add images and videos. Glass controls appear only when glass is enabled. Tools in scene views controls whether docked tools use your theme or an opaque background. Advanced contains terminal colours, theme import, and Copy JSON.

Wallpapers and overlay videos pause while fullscreen Settings covers the workspace. Closing Settings resumes them without changing your saved preferences.

Additional settings such as fonts and corner radius are available through the CLI or settings file.

Wallpaper and glass apply under the canvas and Windows views; a community view paints its own background.

How Settings is organised

The sidebar has General (Appearance, Notifications, Shortcuts, About), then one group per kind of plugin — Agents, Views, Tools — each opening on an overview with a page for every agent, view and tool, and Plugins for browsing and adding more.

Views

The Views overview picks the active view. Each view’s own page configures its toolbar under Display: Automatic, Top, Bottom, Collapsed, or Off. Collapsed leaves a compact handle; Off removes both the toolbar and handle. Custom view controls and keyboard shortcuts keep working. The app Settings button remains available to restore the toolbar. Other views keep their own preferences.

Open Customize actions to choose shortcuts, move them up or down, or show text labels. Reset actions restores that view’s buttons and labels without changing Display. An empty selection removes the toolbar and its handle. Hiding a shortcut keeps existing panels open and does not disable the tool. Browser appears only when switched on under Tools, even if selected in this list.

The CLI uses hidden for Collapsed and off for Off:

hive config set views.chrome.canvas.island '"off"'
hive config set views.chrome.canvas.island '"top"'
hive config set views.toolbars.canvas.actions '["frame", "terminal", "theme"]'
hive config set views.toolbars.canvas.labels true

Plugins

Browse lists the agents and views published in the Hivemind repository’s plugins/index.json, each with a checksum for every file. Installing downloads the files, checks every checksum, and shows what the plugin can do before anything is written; a file that changed after it was listed is refused. Installed adds a view from a folder (with the same review), and lists the views and agents you added, with their load problems.

Agents

The overview picks the default agent and shows which agents this machine has: installed, not installed, or switched off. Each agent’s page says where its CLI was found and which version it is — or that it is not installed, with a link to get it — and sets its launch options (model, permission mode, and whatever else it declares), read from the agent’s own CLI; see Add your own agent.

Tools

Switch on optional tools such as Browser. The Browser page also holds Agent browser control, which lets agents drive Browser panels.

Notifications and Shortcuts

Notifications cover agent status transitions while the app is unfocused or another view is active. Shortcuts lists every binding (1–7 spawns, ⌘L layers, ⌘E views, Shift+Esc undock).

CLI

hive config path
hive config get appearance.glass.blur
hive config set appearance.glass.blur 12
hive theme list
hive theme use nord
hive theme export my-theme.json
hive theme import my-theme.json

Environment

• HIVE_SETTINGS — alternative settings file.
• HIVEMIND_SHELL_ENV=0 — tiles inherit the app environment verbatim (CI/e2e).
• HIVEMIND_BROWSER_CDP_PORT / HIVEMIND_BROWSER_TARGETS — agent-browser bridge, set by the app.