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Setup and skills

This page gathers the places where you shape cterm and Claude Code themselves rather than one project: the settings view, the Setup panel, the Skills & agents view, and the controls in the account foot at the bottom of the sidebar.

What it is for

  • The settings view is an admin's control room: profiles, accounts, projects, rules and backups.
  • The Setup panel answers "what does this session actually get?" (settings, CLAUDE.md files, hooks, skills, plugins, MCP servers, and what it leaves out and why) and edits Claude's settings files without a terminal.
  • Skills & agents keeps Claude skills and agents in one place, with copies that remember their source.
  • The account menu, the avatar in the account foot, carries per-person choices: the look and how much tool detail the rich pane shows.

How to use it

Open the settings view

Click the cog in the account foot, or the + after the profile tabs. The view replaces the main area with one card per section; × or Esc closes it. An admin gets every card below; a user gets one, Your machines, where they link a machine of their own (Your own machine).

  • Profiles: add, relabel or hide Claude logins; see Accounts, profiles and projects.
  • Linked machines: the machines of people's own linked to their accounts, online or not, with remove; an account linked to one is tagged in Accounts (Your own machine).
  • Accounts: every account with its role; a user's root and granted folders, + folder and × to take one back.
  • Projects: every project with its owner and folder, move… to another folder, and for a project served by Herd its https switch and PHP version.
  • Rules for every session: the text appended to every Claude session's prompt, before its project's own rules. Edit it and click Save; default goes back to cterm's own text, off sends none. {{session}}, {{project}} and {{roadmap}} are filled in per session. Sessions take it at their next start or resume.
  • Backups: when the last backup was made, the folder and back up now. Where backups go and a restore stay with the terminal: cterm backup set dir <folder>, and cterm backup restore <file> with the daemon stopped.

Read what a session loads

In an admin's session, click Setup in the session head. The panel shows three columns: Global (this Mac and what cterm puts on every command line), Profile (the Claude login's directory) and Project (the folder, or the task session's worktree). A hollow red dot marks a row left out, with the reason below. Left out only keeps the rows the session skips; Expand all opens every row; Refresh reads again. Above the columns:

  • Default model has three selects, Login, Project and Local, one per settings file, and says which one wins for a new session here.
  • Conversations kept says how many days Claude Code keeps this login's conversations before deleting them, and lets you change it. Type the days next to Login and click Save; empty goes back to Claude Code's default.
  • Appended to the prompt lists every part cterm adds to the session's prompt (the rules, the project's switches, a task's brief), each with its size and the full text a click away.

The panel shows names and structure only. Values of env and headers are never shown.

Edit a settings file or CLAUDE.md

  1. In the Setup panel, click the pencil on the file: the login's settings.json, settings.local.json or CLAUDE.md, or the project's settings.json, settings.local.json, CLAUDE.md, CLAUDE.local.md or .mcp.json. A file that does not exist yet shows a plus, and saving makes it.
  2. Edit the text. Values inside env and headers show as "<hidden: kept as it is>": leave that text and the value stays, or type a new one.
  3. Click Review changes to see the diff, then Save, or Back to keep editing.

If the file changed on disk since you opened it, the save is refused; Open again reads it fresh.

Find, use and edit skills and agents

Click the wand in the account foot. Every account can open Skills & agents; what you can change depends on your role.

  • The sections: Repository (your own git repository, with its Sources), The login (its skills, agents and plugins; skills synced from the Claude account are read-only), then each project.
  • Search: type in the search box and press Enter to search the repository, the login, the projects and the sources; Search online adds skills.sh and the plugin marketplaces.
  • Ask: describe what you need in the row below and click Ask. Claude searches, reads the best candidates and ranks them; when nothing fits it proposes a skill to write. Last asks keeps earlier answers.
  • A row's buttons: the book opens its card (its text, files and source, with scripts and hooks flagged); the pencil edits it; the power button switches it off or on (moved aside, never deleted); use in… copies it into the login or a project. A card offers Use in…, Import (into the repository) and Base (a new skill started from it).
  • + skill and + agent in a section open a form beside the lists.
  • Drift: a copy remembers its source. When they differ, a tag says source changed (with Update), edited here (with Promote, back to the repository, when it came from there), or both changed (with keep ours, take theirs and merge with Claude, which shows the merged files as a diff before you apply them). Check for updates fetches every source first.

A user sees the repository and their own projects, searches, and copies skills into their projects; everything else is an admin's. From a terminal, cterm skills repo <path or URL> registers the repository and cterm skills source add <owner/repo> adds a source.

Watch the plan's usage

Above the account foot, a bar per limit of the sidebar's login (5 h and Week) shows the share used and when it resets. It turns amber from 75% and red from 90%, says "not started" when no five-hour window is open, and shows its age once no session has reported for a while. A user's meter is the default login's.

Pick a theme

Click the avatar in the account foot, then Colour theme: the menu turns to the list of themes, Follow the system, cterm light (the terminal stays dark) and cterm dark, then the dark palettes (One Dark, Dracula, Nord, Solarized Dark, GitHub Dark, Gruvbox Dark) and the light ones (GitHub Light, Solarized Light, Gruvbox Light). Under a palette the terminal takes its colours too. The pick is kept for your account on every device.

Choose how much tool detail you see

The account menu (the avatar in the account foot) has three choices under Tool calls in the chat: Shown (every tool call as a card), Grouped (consecutive calls folded into one row) and Hidden (only Claude's text and the dialogs). Permission, question and plan cards always show. Under the first, a session's Tools button hides that one session's cards in this browser.

How it works

The settings view sends each change to the daemon, which allows it only to admins and keeps it in its store, ~/.cterm/cterm.db. Backups are one archive of what cterm alone keeps, made every night, into ~/cterm-backups by default.

The Setup panel is read fresh from disk each time it opens (setup.ts), deciding "loaded" by the same rules that build the session's command line. Edits go through a fixed list of files (setup-edit.ts); the previous content is kept in ~/.cterm/setup-backups/ and each write is logged. With Skills & agents, these are the only places cterm writes under Claude's own directories.

Skills & agents copies files and never runs one. Each copy is recorded in a skills-lock.json beside it, which is how drift is found. The merge and the ask are claude -p calls on the login, no API key.

The usage meter reads the rate_limits that Claude Code puts in its status line, so it updates while a session runs. The theme and tool view are kept per account and cached in the browser.

Scenarios

Why does this user's session not see my MCP server?

A user says Claude cannot reach a tool you use every day. You open their session, click Setup and turn on Left out only: the Profile column is left out, the MCP servers with --strict-mcp-config under them. That is by design, and the panel shows it without a test.

Raising the model for one project

You want new sessions in one project to start on Opus. In a session there, you pick it in the Project select under Default model; the note now says the project setting wins.

Bringing a skill back in step

The Skills & agents view tags your reviewer agent both changed: you edited it in the login, and its source moved on. You click merge with Claude, read the note and the diff, and apply it. The tag goes away.

Written in docs/site/pages/setup-and-skills.md and built by docs/site/build.mjs.