Codeman maintainer
b451b3851e
Maintainer merge-time fixes for the MCP server sync (opt-in mcpSyncEnabled, synced, default OFF).
M1, parse errors echoed config text (secrets included) into the HTTP response and Settings:
smol-toml's TomlError carries a code frame of the offending lines and V8's JSON "Unexpected
token" errors quote source. Both catch sites now go through describeMcpSyncError(): a parse
failure is reported by line/column only ("not valid TOML (line 3, column 21)", "not valid
JSON"), an errno failure by Node's own message (code, syscall, path), the module's own
messages via a McpConfigError class, anything else as "unexpected error". Tests put a secret
on the broken line (TOML, both JSON message shapes, and a write refused at the re-parse that
would have quoted a copied server's env) and assert it is absent from the result and from the
route's response body; they fail against the old code.
M2, CODEX_HOME / CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR / XDG_CONFIG_HOME were ignored, so a sync could create a
file the CLI never reads and report success: new optional registry field
capabilities.mcpConfig.relocation { envVar, path } (registry data, no id branch; schema
reuses the env-name and no-traversal path rules). Declared for claude (CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR,
checked in the 2.1.289 binary), codex (CODEX_HOME), opencode (XDG_CONFIG_HOME) and gemini
(GEMINI_CLI_HOME, gemini-cli paths.ts); antigravity follows $HOME only (agy 1.1.12 has no
relocation var). Resolved from the server process env at call time: absolute moves the file,
empty means unset, anything else reports the target with the new status "skipped" plus the
reason and writes nothing. Dedupe is now by resolved file. When a caller overrides `home`
without passing `env`, process.env is not consulted, and the route tests clear those vars so
a CI runner's XDG_CONFIG_HOME can never aim a write outside the temp HOME.
M3, feature undocumented: CLAUDE.md Key Patterns paragraph (opt-in, admin-only, additive
only, backups, re-parse validation, 0600 for copied secrets, names-only responses with
position-only parse errors, capabilities.mcpConfig and relocation), a Settings-Reference row
in the wiki, and docs/cli-registry.md + docs/api-reference.md updated for relocation, the
"skipped" status and the error policy.
Nits:
- N1 Preview/Sync before Save: the UI remembers the saved value on open and says "Save
settings to turn MCP sync on first" instead of calling the routes; the 403 message also
says to turn it on and save.
- N2 non-admins in multi-user mode: _applyMcpSyncAdminGate() hides the whole MCP group, called
from applyMcpSyncVisibility() and the codeman:me event like the CLI-management gate.
- N3 scope chip says "synced".
- N4 "(1 servers)" pluralised; the unsupported list only names installed CLIs (route test
pins it with a per-test installed set).
- N5 McpSyncResult / McpSyncTargetResult moved to src/types/mcp-sync.ts (barrel export); only
the route imported them, so no churn.
Verified with an isolated instance (throwaway HOME, own instance and tmux socket) and
Playwright: chip, save-first message, preview rendering and the admin gate.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
15 KiB
Settings Reference
Two settings surfaces, and the rule that explains why a setting you changed on your laptop did not follow you to your phone.
| Surface | Scope | Opened from |
|---|---|---|
| App Settings | Global, this Codeman install. | The header gear. |
| Session Options | One session. | The session's tab. |
App Settings is a single scrolling document with a rail acting as a table of contents; clicking a rail entry scrolls rather than switching. Session Options genuinely switches panels.
Per-device versus synced
Some settings live on the server and follow you to every device. Others are stored in the browser and stay put. This is deliberate, not an oversight: your phone wants a different font size, a different keyboard bar, and a different set of header buttons than your desktop.
| Category | Examples |
|---|---|
| Per-device, local | Skin, WebGL renderer, local echo, CJK input, extended keyboard bar, File Viewer and Cron header buttons. Never sent to the server at all. |
| Per-device policy | Most show* toggles, plan usage chip, language. Stored server-side, but a device only takes the server value when it has no local one of its own. |
| Synced | Models, effort, CLI options, notification preferences, voice settings, display name, the agent skill and approvals toggles. |
The practical rule: appearance and input are per device, behaviour is shared. If a change did not follow you, it is in one of the first two rows, and you change it again on that device.
App Settings
Updates
Current version, a manual check, and the in-app updater. Covers git-clone installs supervised by systemd or launchd; npm installs report as non-updatable. See Running As A Service.
Terminal & Input
| Setting | Default | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Local Echo | On for touch devices | Paints keystrokes locally and flushes on Enter. See Input And Voice. |
| CJK Input | Off | IME composition through a dedicated text field. |
| Extended Keyboard Bar | Per device | Which accessory bar phones get. Shell sessions override it while they are active. |
| Wheel Scrolls Local History | Off | Keeps the wheel on the local buffer instead of forwarding it to the CLI. |
| Auto Copy Selection | Off | Copies highlighted terminal text to the clipboard the moment you finish selecting it. Ctrl+C still copies on demand. |
| Trim The Pane Margin On Copy | On | Takes the left margin a full-screen agent CLI paints down its own edge off a copy, so the text pastes flush. Each CLI declares its own width, and the strip never exceeds the indent every selected line shares, so nesting is kept. Claude Code and Codex declare a margin; a shell does not. |
| Normal / Bold font weight | xterm defaults | Per device, each slot from 100 to 900. The bundled JetBrains Mono renders every step, so a lighter normal weight makes Claude's bold headings stand out. Applies live to the terminal, both echo overlays and open team panes. |
| WebGL Renderer | On | With a GPU-stall watchdog that falls back to DOM rendering. |
| Gesture Control | Off | Camera hand tracking. Also needs CODEMAN_GESTURE=1 on the server. |
| Key tester | n/a | A diagnostic that stores nothing. Click the box and press keys to see what this browser reports (key, code, modifiers) for keydown, keypress and keyup, for when a chord such as Shift+Enter behaves differently on one device. Keys pressed there reach no session and trigger no shortcut. |
Header & Panels
Chips for every optional header control, with a live preview of the resulting header:
Run, Font Size, System Stats, Redraw Terminal, Response Viewer, Away Digest, Session Manager, Attachments, File Viewer, Multi-monitor, Split, Plan Usage, Lifecycle Log, Monitor, Project Insights, File Browser, Subagents, Approvals Inbox, Read My Mind, Ultracode Agents, Ultracode Windows, Cron.
Most default to off. The stock desktop header is system stats, File Viewer, and the gear. New header controls never appear on phones. Split is desktop-only regardless of this setting — the button and the feature both stay off below a ~1180px viewport, where two resizable panes plus their divider have nowhere to go.
This section also holds background-agent tracking, including whether to track agents for every session or only the active tab.
Appearance
| Setting | Notes |
|---|---|
| Skin | Theme palettes, light ones included. Applied before first paint, so no flash of the wrong theme. |
| Entrance Animations | Per-surface animation styles for tabs, terminals, windows, and lineage lines. All default to the legacy no-animation behaviour. |
| Display Name | Your name in the UI. Cosmetic only; it never renames the package, CLI, API, or storage. |
| Interface Language | English or Simplified Chinese. Per device. |
| Session List Layout | Header tab strip (default), a collapsible left sidebar, or the sidebar with detailed rows. See The Dashboard. |
| Tab Orientation | Keeps the header list but turns the strip vertical beside the terminal, resizable, with detailed rows by default. Desktop and tablet only. |
| Vertical Rail Order | By activity (default) sorts the rail the way the home screens are sorted; Manual keeps your tab order and drag-reordering. |
| Tall Tabs | Taller tab strip. |
| Pop-out Button on Tabs | Adds the detach control to tabs, with a per-tab override. |
| Spawn Lineage Lines | Arcs from a parent tab to sessions it spawned. Desktop only, on by default. |
| Auto-name Sessions | Titles a new tab after its first prompt, keeping the case prefix (w3-myapp: fix the login redirect). Synced, off by default. See The Dashboard. |
| Overview Home Screen | The phone home screen. On by default. |
Models
Claude model cards, the 1M context window switch, the thinking effort segment and the advisor segment. The cards and the switch compose into one model choice, so there is no separate "which one wins" question.
Model, effort and advisor are all soft defaults: the model is written into the case's
.claude/settings.local.json and effort and advisor are passed at start, so /model,
/effort and /advisor inside a session override them at any time.
Advisor gives new Claude sessions Claude Code's
advisor tool: a second, stronger model that Claude
consults before committing to an approach, when an error keeps coming back, and before it
calls a task done. A common pairing is a Sonnet main model with an Opus or Fable advisor,
which costs less than running the stronger model all the time. Default leaves it to
whatever you picked with /advisor yourself. The advisor needs the Anthropic API (not
Bedrock or Vertex), and an advisor that ranks below the session's model is simply not
attached.
Custom model endpoints (off by default) adds a saved-endpoint list plus a matching section to the Run dropdown, for pointing a harness at your own OpenAI-compatible server instead of its native cloud backend. See Custom Model Endpoints.
Agents & CLIs
| Setting | Notes |
|---|---|
| Startup Mode | Claude's permission mode for new sessions. Default skips prompts; auto uses Anthropic's classifier-guarded mode; normal prompts; or give an explicit allowed-tools list. |
| Allowed Tools | The list used by the explicit mode. |
| Ralph / Todo Tracker | Enables the Ralph loop surfaces. |
| Agent Teams | Experimental teams. Also needs the CLI's own environment flag. |
| Codeman Agent Skill | Injects the agent skill into new Claude sessions per case. Off by default. See Driving Codeman From An Agent. |
| Remote auto-reconnect | Reattaches dropped remote SSH sessions. On by default. |
| Nice priority / value | Runs agent processes at a lower CPU priority. |
| Bypass approvals and sandbox | Pi's project trust. Read Agent CLIs before enabling. |
| Animated status effects | Cosmetic. |
| MCP server sync | Copies the MCP servers each installed, enabled CLI (Claude, Codex, Gemini, OpenCode, Antigravity) has into the others' own config files. Synced, off by default, admin only in multi-user mode. Turn it on and save, then Preview shows what would change and Sync now applies it. It only adds missing servers, keeps the previous file as .codeman-bak, and leaves a file that receives env values or headers readable by you only. A config dir moved by CODEX_HOME, CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR, XDG_CONFIG_HOME or GEMINI_CLI_HOME in Codeman's own environment is followed. |
Notifications
Master toggle, browser notifications, push subscription, audio alerts, the idle threshold that decides when a quiet session counts as needing you, and the server-wide webhook (ntfy, Slack, Discord or generic JSON; admins only in multi-user mode). See Notifications And Approvals.
Voice
Active provider and the engine behind it, insert mode, language, domain keywords to bias recognition, the Deepgram API key, and the opt-in switch for transcribing through this server's Claude login, with its live credential status. See Input And Voice.
Shortcuts
Rebinding for the shortcut registry. See Keyboard Shortcuts.
System
CLAUDE.md template for new cases, default working directory, the image watcher, and
Cloudflare tunnel controls including the tunnel and upload URLs. In multi-user mode, the
Users administration entry is injected here.
Session Options
Per session, from the tab.
| Panel | Contains |
|---|---|
| Respawn | Auto-resume on usage limit, the respawn cycle configuration, presets, duration. See Keeping Agents Running. |
| Session | Name, working directory, environment overrides, per-tab pop-out override. |
| Ralph / Todo | Loop configuration, iteration and todo caps, circuit breaker reset. See Autonomous Loops. |
| Summary | What this session has done: tokens, activity, run summary. |
Panels that only make sense for Claude are hidden for other run modes rather than shown and failing.
Environment variables
Some things are configured before the server starts, not in the UI:
| Variable | Effect |
|---|---|
CODEMAN_PORT |
Listen port. |
CODEMAN_HOST |
Bind address. Loopback by default. |
CODEMAN_PASSWORD / CODEMAN_USERNAME |
HTTP Basic credentials. Username defaults to admin. |
CODEMAN_ALLOWED_HOSTS |
Extra Host and Origin allowlist entries for a reverse proxy. |
CODEMAN_INSTANCE |
Scopes the data directory and tmux socket together. Required for a second instance. |
CODEMAN_MULTIUSER |
Enables multi-user mode. |
CODEMAN_GESTURE |
Makes gesture control available to be enabled. |
CODEMAN_DOCKER_BRIDGE_HOOKS |
Lets in-container hooks reach the host on a loopback bind. |
CODEMAN_FILE_PICKER_ROOTS |
Extra roots for the path picker. |
CODEMAN_ALLOW_UNAUTHENTICATED_NETWORK |
Acknowledges exposing the server with no password. |
CODEMAN_BASE_URL |
Mounts Codeman under a sub-path behind a reverse proxy that forwards the prefix unchanged. See Remote Access. |
CODEMAN_MAX_DOWNLOAD_BYTES |
Cap on raw file bodies and downloads. 2 GB by default, 0 for none. |
CODEMAN_MAX_REMOTE_FILE_SSH |
Concurrent ssh reads for files in remote cases. 4 by default. |
Gotchas
- A setting that did not sync is per device. Change it again on that device.
- The plan usage chip and its telemetry exporter are one setting. Enabling the chip without the exporter would leave it blank forever, so it is deliberately not separable.
- Toggling a header button does nothing on a phone. Phones deliberately ignore most of the header chips.
- Enabling a feature does not retroactively configure existing sessions. The agent skill injection, for instance, applies at session creation.
Read next
- The Dashboard - what each control does once visible.
- Keeping Agents Running - the Respawn panel in depth.
- Agent CLIs - model, effort, and permission modes.