Aethon

Appearance

Settings & search ​

Two overlay surfaces ship as built-ins — both registered components, so an extension can replace either without forking the chrome.

Settings panel — Cmd+, ​

The Settings panel (Cmd+, on macOS, Ctrl+, elsewhere) is the GUI for ~/.aethon/config.toml. Every key writable from config.toml has a field here.

Sections, in order:

  • Appearance — theme, font size.
  • View — global default visibility for thinking blocks and tool-call cards.
  • Guardrails — restrict agent tools to the project root, soft prompt anchor.
  • Notifications — completion notifications (when unfocused) and minimum turn duration.
  • Agent — system-prompt override, Codex Fast mode, and provider / bash / inline-subagent timeouts. (The default model is set from the header model picker, which persists [agent] model.)
  • Shell — default share mode, shell program, args, inherit env.
  • Behavior — confirm-before-close when a shell job is running.
  • Voice — toggle and hold-to-talk hotkeys, speak-replies-aloud, hands-free conversation, and recognition providers.
  • Updater — stable/nightly channel and background-check toggle.
  • Nix devshell — detection mode, cache lifetime, lockfile refresh, and manual refresh.
  • Extensions — the list of loaded extensions and their sources.
  • Advanced — a pointer to edit config.toml directly for keys not surfaced here, plus two convenience buttons.

The two buttons in Advanced:

  • Open config.toml — opens ~/.aethon/config.toml in Aethon's in-app Monaco editor for power-user edits.
  • Reset layout — restores the sidebar, file sidebar, and terminal panel sizes to their defaults without changing config.toml.

Direct edits override

The Settings panel reads the file every time it opens, so manual edits take effect on next open. Edits made in the panel write back through a JSON-shaped diff, so any keys you've added by hand that Aethon doesn't manage are preserved.

Cross-session search — Cmd+Shift+F ​

Cmd+Shift+F opens the search overlay. Unlike the command palette (which searches active state), search reaches into:

  • All chat history across closed tabs (via the on-disk pi sessions).
  • All bash output captured in the agent-bash buffer.
  • All open tab titles and sidebar entries.

Results are clickable — selecting one opens the originating session (reopening it from ~/.aethon/sessions/ if needed) and scrolls to the matching line.

TIP

Closed-tab search is read-only — selecting a closed-session result opens it in a new tab; the original tab record stays gone.

Notification stack ​

Allow/Deny prompts (from read-write shell mode), extension_lifecycle events, completion notifications, and update prompts all stack into a right-aligned notification stack that sits above all other chrome. It's a registered builtin — replace it with aethon.registerComponent("notification-stack", …) if you want a different feel.

Replacing these surfaces ​

ts
// Replace the settings panel:
aethon.registerComponent("settings-panel", mySettingsPanel);

// Replace the search overlay:
aethon.registerComponent("search-panel", mySearchPanel);

// Replace notifications:
aethon.registerComponent("notification-stack", myNotificationStack);

The keybindings (Cmd+,, Cmd+Shift+F) still trigger the overlay; only the visual layer changes.

Where to next ​