---
title: "First launch"
description: "The handful of settings worth changing before you start working."
---
Open tty7 and you get a window with one tab and one shell, and a tab sidebar
down the left. Everything below is optional — but these are the settings people
end up changing anyway, so they are worth five minutes now.
Open Settings with ⌘ , (Ctrl , on Windows and Linux), or
from the command palette (⌘ P → *Settings*).
## 1. Pick a theme
**Settings → Appearance → Theme.** Nine themes ship built in — Light, One Light,
Catppuccin Latte, Rosé Pine Dawn, Dark, Dracula, Harbor, One Dark Pro, and
Rosé Pine. The default is **Light**.
Turn on **Sync with system** to pick a light theme and a dark theme separately;
tty7 then follows the OS appearance live.
Transparency lives on the same page, under **Transparency** — opacity applies to
every theme, and *Follow theme* hands the decision back to the theme's own
setting. On Windows there is also a **Background material** picker (Mica,
Acrylic, and friends).
[More about themes →](/customization/themes)
## 2. Choose your shell
**Settings → Terminal → Shell.** Leave **Program** empty to use the platform
default. Otherwise it takes an executable name on PATH or an absolute path
(`zsh`, `fish`, `pwsh`, `nu`, `/opt/homebrew/bin/bash`), plus **Arguments** —
`-l` for a login shell, say. Arguments split the way a command line splits, so
quote anything that contains a space: `-c "echo hi"` is two arguments, not
three.
**Start in** decides what a *fresh* shell opens in: tty7's launch directory
(the default), your home folder, or a fixed path. New tabs and splits keep
inheriting the active pane's directory either way.
## 3. macOS only: decide what Option does
**Settings → Input → Keyboard → Option (⌥) acts as Meta.**
Off (the default), ⌥ B types `∫`, which is what macOS has always
done. On, it sends the escape chord shells expect, so ⌥ B moves back
a word and ⌥ ⌫ deletes one. Turn it on if you live in readline;
leave it off if you type accented characters.
## 4. If you use coding agents, install the hooks
**Settings → Agents.** tty7 detects 20 coding CLIs by process name on its own —
you get brand avatars and tab labels for free. The *status dots*, the "needs
your permission" notifications, and `tty7 wait` all need one more thing: a small
hook the agent calls to report what it is doing.
Click **Install** next to Claude Code, Codex, TraeCode, Copilot CLI, OpenCode,
Pi, Grok Build, or Oh My Pi. It writes into that agent's own config directory and can be
removed from the same row.
[More about agents →](/agents/status)
## 5. Know what Quit does
Plain **Quit** closes the window and leaves the background server running.
Your shells, builds, and agent turns keep going, and reopening tty7 reattaches
to them.
To actually stop everything, use **Quit and Stop Server…** from the tray icon's
menu. It says so plainly before it does it: anything still running in your
shells is terminated, while your tabs and layout are kept and reopen with fresh
shells.
This is why there is no tmux in the picture. The persistence is not a feature
of your shell setup — it belongs to the server underneath.
[Core concepts →](/getting-started/concepts)
## 6. Tune the notifications
**Settings → Window & Tabs → Notifications.** By default tty7 posts a desktop
notification when a foreground command that ran longer than 10 seconds
finishes — but only while the window is unfocused. Set **Notify on command
finish** to *Never* or *Always*, and move the threshold if 10 seconds is the
wrong number for your work.
Agent notifications ("needs your permission…", "finished after 42s") follow the
same policy.
## 7. Coming from tmux?
**Settings → Keybindings → Preset → tmux** remaps pane and tab actions onto a
prefix, ⌃ B by default. ⌃ B C opens a tab,
⌃ B % splits, ⌃ B then an arrow moves focus.
A bare prefix reaches the shell after about a second, and prefix plus an unbound
key passes straight through — so a tmux binding you did not remap still lands in
whatever is running.
[More about keybindings →](/customization/keybindings)
## Where things live
| | macOS / Linux | Windows |
|---|---|---|
| Settings file | `~/.config/tty7/config.json` | `%APPDATA%\tty7\config.json` |
| Custom themes | `~/.config/tty7/themes/` | `%APPDATA%\tty7\themes\` |
Everything in the Settings window writes to `config.json`, and you can edit it
by hand instead — see the [configuration reference](/reference/configuration).
Set `TTY7_CONFIG_DIR` to move the whole directory somewhere else.
## Next
Workspaces, tabs, panes, and the server that owns them.
Suggestions, completion, and history search — the part you touch most.