Settings
Everything configurable, in seven categories. Open it from the app rail or the menubar gear.
Find things by searching
Press Ctrl+K / Cmd+K with Settings open. Type a keyword — “webhook”, “tray”, “MCP”, “temperature”, “memory” — and the results deep-link straight to the control, highlighting it when you land.
Search crosses app boundaries: a memory query opens Brain, a provider or sampler query opens the Models app. That is intentional, because those settings genuinely live there.
The map
General
| Section | Contains |
|---|---|
| General | App updates and channel, desktop app and tray, launch at startup, network access, filesystem access, terminal behaviour and default shell, constrained tool calls, re-run setup |
| Notifications | Master toggle, per-category (chat, tasks, background jobs), sounds, sounds while watching the active chat |
| Audio | Input and output devices, echo cancellation, noise suppression, auto gain |
| About | Version and build info |
Two settings here matter more than the rest:
- Filesystem access — workspace-only (default) or full disk. This is the containment boundary for every file and git tool. See Tools and permissions.
- Network access — loopback-only (default) or LAN. Changing it needs a restart. See Use Minnow from another device.
Apps
Apps lists what is installed. Every shipped app is core, so there is nothing to disable and you will see a “Coming soon” placeholder where optional apps will appear.
Issues is the taxonomy editor for the tracker: types (icons and colors), statuses with workflow roles and board flags, and priorities.
Appearance
Chat view selects Compact (expandable working transcript with a separate final answer) or Full (every step stays visible; tool calls and thoughts stay collapsed until expanded). Changes apply immediately and persist across restarts.
Theme family and mode — 16 themes in total, eight families each with a dark and a light variant — plus wallpaper, a Google Fonts catalog for UI and monospace (plus optional uploads), and custom accent colours. Web fonts load only for the pair you pick; System UI uses the fonts already on the machine.
Models
Providers, Routing, Sampler, Thinking, Usage & cost. These are the same panels the Models app shows.
Agents
| Section | Contains |
|---|---|
| Agents | Prompt profiles (Full / Lite / custom) with a live token estimate, composer modes, plan granularity, work agents, sub-agent types, context policy, setup profile export and import |
| Rules | Standing instructions injected into every prompt, organised into groups. Empty groups can be deleted; groups that still have rules cannot |
| Agent packs | Download a template or the built-in pack, upload a zip, manage installed packs |
| Autopilot | Defaults for orchestrate boards: Running or Stopped start, git worktree isolation (not host containment), concurrency, planner model, retries, self-heal, infra provisioning |
| Watchdog | Generation limits while streaming. Sub-agent crash/timeout retry is the journal reconcile — wall-clock lives under Sub-agents |
Watchdog is the setting to reach for when a generation hangs and sits there forever.
Generation timeouts cover the model stream itself. The idle timeout resets whenever new tokens arrive, so it catches a genuinely stalled stream without cutting off a slow one. Either limit can be set to 0 to turn it off, or use Enable generation timeouts.
Sub-agents do not use a heartbeat or stall supervisor. A crashed or timed-out sub-agent is retried from the journal. Wall-clock for one attempt is Settings → Agents → Sub-agents (default timeout and per-type timeout).
| Setting | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Idle timeout | 60 min | How long the model may stop sending stream data before the generation is aborted (resets on each chunk) |
| Max duration | 240 min | Hard wall-clock cap on a single generation |
Integrations
| Section | Contains |
|---|---|
| Search | Web search provider, fallback chain, Brave and Tavily keys |
| Servers | Managed local servers — SearXNG and llama-cpp — enable, auto-start, port |
| Tools | The full tool catalog with Off/Ask/Full per tool, grouped by category, plus bulk actions and the result cache |
| Skills | Enable or disable skills, author your own, and the Skills Library for third-party packs |
| Browser | Automation allowlist, navigation permission, tab restore, DevTools dock |
| MCP servers | Model Context Protocol servers |
| Language servers | LSP configuration and diagnostics |
| Editor | Ghost text, inline completion, context sources, caching |
| External | Outgoing webhooks with HMAC signing |
Advanced
Health & diagnostics — subsystem probes, grouped errors, a local log tail, Copy report for a redacted summary, and the toggle for filing renderer errors as issues. Nothing is sent off-device.
Board testing — a manual workflow for orchestrate boards: an in-process fake model, seeded test boards, and board-log validation. For development and debugging, not daily use.
Where settings are stored
In your Minnow home as separate files — config.json, tools.json, search.json, rules.json, skills.json, and others. Secrets are encrypted; the rest is plain JSON you could read in an editor, though Settings normalizes on load and hand-editing is a recovery tool, not a workflow.