Settings and Customization

Tune Jean's defaults for backends, prompts, appearance, keybindings, integrations, and experimental features.

Jean ships with strong defaults, but it is meant to be shaped around how you work.

The Preferences dialog is where that happens.

General

The General pane covers the core app behavior, including:

CLI installation and authentication status
default backend and model choices
terminal and editor defaults
git polling behavior
archive retention and removal behavior
notification sounds (None, Work Work, Job's Done)
expand tool calls by default
window behavior and cleanup settings
onboarding helpers and cleanup actions

This is the best place to set the "every new project should feel like this" baseline.

Appearance and keybindings

The Appearance pane covers:

theme mode (light, dark, system)
UI font, chat font, and independent size scaling for each
zoom level (also Cmd/Ctrl + and Cmd/Ctrl -)
separate syntax themes for light and dark mode
file edit mode (inline view or external editor)
keyboard shortcuts

Keybindings are user-configurable, so the defaults are only a starting point.

Providers

The Providers pane manages custom Claude CLI profiles.

Use this when you need Claude CLI to route through another endpoint or environment while keeping Jean's session workflow unchanged.

Usage

The Usage pane currently focuses on Codex usage information, including:

plan type
credits remaining when available
session and weekly usage windows
extra model limits when exposed by the CLI

Jean lets you customize the prompt templates behind every built-in workflow (issue and PR investigation, code review, commit messages, release notes, conflict resolution, session naming, recaps, and more).

You can also set model, provider, backend, and reasoning defaults per workflow.

See Magic prompts for the full catalog and override options.

MCP servers and integrations

Two other panes matter a lot for power users:

MCP Servers for tool discovery and enablement
Integrations for services like Linear

These decide how much extra context and tooling a session can see.

Experimental features

Jean keeps some features behind an Experimental pane, including:

parallel execution prompting
automatic session recap
session recap model selection
debug mode

These are useful, but they are intentionally labeled as less stable than the core workflow.

Opinionated plugins

A dedicated Opinionated pane installs curated third-party tools that reduce token usage and reshape agent output.

See Opinionated plugins for what is included and how each plugin behaves.