Shell environment

When you launch Claudette from Finder, Dock, Spotlight, or a Linux desktop launcher, the OS only hands the app a minimal environment. Anything you set in your interactive shell init — .zshrc, .bashrc, .zprofile, .bash_profile, ~/.config/fish/config.fish — is invisible by default. Tools like mise activate, nvm, and pyenv typically configure PATH in .zshrc, and custom secrets like JWT_CLIENT_ID or GH_TOKEN are exported there too.

Claudette captures that environment for you.

How it works

At app launch, Claudette runs your shell as $SHELL -l -i -c 'env -0' (or the equivalent fish command), captures the result, diffs it against the launchd / desktop-launcher baseline, applies a denylist, and exposes the remaining vars as a low-precedence env tier. Per-project env from direnv, mise, and dotenv plugins layers on top — they always win on key collision.

The probe runs in the background, but the first agent or integrated terminal waits for that bounded probe before spawning. This ensures sessions opened immediately after a Finder, Dock, Spotlight, or desktop-launcher start receive the captured PATH instead of permanently inheriting the minimal GUI PATH. If the probe fails or times out, Claudette falls back to the environment supplied by the OS.

You can inspect and control what was captured at Settings → Environment → Shell environment.

Denylist

Some env-var names are never forwarded, regardless of your config:

• Injection vectors — LD_PRELOAD, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES, DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH, DYLD_FALLBACK_*. Forwarding these is a known privilege-escalation path.
• Shell-presentation noise — PS1, PROMPT_COMMAND, OLDPWD, PWD, SHLVL, _, STARSHIP_*. Meaningless in a non-interactive subprocess.

You can extend the denylist with your own glob patterns in the Settings panel. For example:

AWS_*
STRIPE_*
GITHUB_TOKEN

Refresh

Claudette watches your rc files (.zshrc, .bashrc, .zprofile, .bash_profile, .profile, ~/.config/fish/config.fish). When any of them changes on disk, the captured env invalidates and the next subprocess spawn re-probes — no app restart needed.

You can also force a re-probe via Settings → Environment → Shell environment → Reload.

Disabling

If you’d rather Claudette run with only the launchd baseline, click Disable shell-env entirely at the bottom of the card. Per-project env providers (direnv, mise, etc.) keep working — you only lose the shell-init layer.

Platform support

• macOS and Linux — full support.
• Windows — Claudette reads PATH from the registry on every spawn so binaries installed by winget and similar tools are found. Capturing arbitrary user-defined Windows env vars from the registry is tracked separately.