Customizing Mel
Settings, tab configs, and the pieces you can shape to your workflow.
Mel keeps customization in a few well-defined places: the Settings window for app-wide behavior, tab configs for reproducible workspaces, and Drive for the things you reuse. A rule Mel holds itself to: every switch in Settings is real — if a toggle exists, the behavior behind it is wired.
The Settings window
Open Settings from the gear icon in the titlebar. It's a full-window view with a searchable left nav and these pages:
| Page | What lives there |
|---|---|
| Account | Sign-in and account details |
| Appearance | UI zoom, block dividers, compact block headers, dim inactive panes |
| AI | Shell-command autodetect in the agent input, input hints, auto-open "Thoughts", voice input, AI ghost suggestions, default models for new conversations |
| Profiles | Profile management |
| Features | Session block cap and feature toggles like the zero-state help block |
| Keyboard shortcuts | A searchable command → key table (read-only today; see keyboard shortcuts) |
| Privacy | Privacy controls |
| Sessions | Session behavior |
| Billing and usage | Plan and usage |
| About | Version info |
Everything is backed by one file — ~/.mel/settings.json — and the nav footer's Open settings file takes you straight to it if you'd rather edit JSON. Changes apply immediately.
Tab configs: reproducible workspaces
A tab config is a small .toml file in ~/.mel/tab_configs/ describing a tab: its name, color, and a pane layout — including splits, a working directory per pane, and a startup command per pane. The + button in the titlebar lists your configs; picking one opens a fully set-up tab. Configs can declare parameters (free text, or repo and branch pickers) that Mel prompts for when the tab opens and substitutes into paths and commands as {{name}}.
Right-click a config in the + menu to make it the default — after that, plain ctrl+T opens your configured workspace instead of a bare tab. "New Tab Config" writes a stub file and opens it in the editor so you can start from a working skeleton.
The sidebar itself is adjustable too: the gear in the tab rail sets density (compact or expanded), what the primary row shows, the subtitle, and hover details.
Drive: your reusable library
Drive (in the tools panel, ctrl+\) is a personal library persisted on disk:
- Workflows — saved commands with
{argument}placeholders; clicking one inserts it into the prompt with the first argument pre-selected. - Prompts — reusable agent prompts, inserted as your query.
- Notebooks — markdown notes with a
/block menu and a live preview toggle. - Environment variables — named sets with masked values that can resolve from a command or a secrets manager, exported into the active pane on load.
Feature info cards
Every icon-only control in Mel explains itself: rest the pointer on it for a moment and a small card appears with what the control does, what it's great for, and its shortcut. If you're ever unsure what a button is, hover it — and for anything else, the command palette (ctrl+P) is the searchable index of every action.