Settings & configuration

Open Settings with Ctrl+, (⌘,) or via the Switcher. It’s a tabbed main-area view:

Appearance

• Theme — six presets: Dark, Light, High contrast, Nord, Solarized dark, Sepia — plus a System/Light/Dark appearance preference and a glow intensity control. Status-orb semantics stay constant across every theme (identity is color, state is motion), and prefers-reduced-motion is respected.
• Terminal font — family and size; a Nerd Font is bundled as the default.

Notifications

Do-Not-Disturb silences attention cues globally. (The Pro edition adds focus-aware native desktop notifications and OSC 9/777 passthrough, with per-project mute.)

Tools

• Default editor — Open-in-editor presets for VS Code, Cursor, Zed, and Windsurf, or any custom command (honored verbatim).
• Default shell — what new projects connect with (WSL2/PowerShell/Git Bash/cmd on Windows; zsh/bash/fish on macOS).

New projects

The default groups and the agent catalog (which agent commands are offered when you create a project). See Agents in Atrium.

About

Version, a Check for updates button, the keyboard cheatsheet, and the no-telemetry badge (see Privacy).

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Where configuration lives

Atrium has three configuration surfaces, each with a distinct job:

~/.atrium/atrium.json — your cockpit

The durable store for everything you’ve set up: projects, groups, templates, panes (as dormant skeletons), per-project view memory, and managed agent permissions. Machine-local; you never edit it by hand. Alongside it live live.json (the live status snapshot) and panes/ (recent output) — the files the MCP tools read.

atrium.toml — the portable project file

Export project writes a small TOML file at the repo root that you commit; Import recreates the project on any machine. It’s deliberately portable: no absolute paths (the working directory is implicit — the repo it lives in), just the project name and its groups/templates:

schema_version = 1
name = "my-app"

[[group]]
name = "Agents"
role = "agents"

  [[group.templates]]
  name = "Claude"
  command = "claude"

[[group]]
name = "Commands"

  [[group.templates]]
  name = "Dev server"
  command = "bun run dev"

Import is gated by review: because templates contain startup commands, importing surfaces every command for explicit human review before anything can run — a cloned repo’s atrium.toml can’t execute anything by itself.

<project>/.atrium/ — the in-repo workspace

todos.json and notes/*.md — the dock’s TODOs and scratchpad. These travel with the checkout and are what agents read/write through MCP. App-level preferences (theme, fonts, zoom, editor, catalog) are stored locally by the app and aren’t part of any of these files.