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Preferences

Cue's Preferences window is launched from the tray menu (menu bar → Preferences… on macOS, tray → Preferences… on Windows) or via Cmd+, while the popup is focused.

It runs as a separate subprocess, so it can't deadlock the menu- bar event loop. State edits are deferred — the Apply button commits them; Revert discards them.

The window has four tabs.

General

  • Anthropic API key — paste / change. Never logged.
  • Enable Streaming — toggles the background screen recorder
  • digest pipeline. Default off; turn on to use the rolling context feature in the suggestion popup and the activity-summary digest.
  • Generate digests on-device — opt-in switch for the local vision backend (Gemma 4). When off, digests use Anthropic Haiku with screenshots in the cloud. When on, screenshots stay on this device. See On-device vision.
  • Allow cloud fallback when local model unavailable — only enabled when the on-device switch is on. If checked, Cue routes to the cloud when the local model fails. Off by default — the digest is skipped instead. The sub-text is explicit: enabling this will send screenshots to Anthropic when the local path fails.
  • Local model — E2B (faster) / E4B (better) segmented selector.
  • Status banner — model + mmproj download state, with "Download now" if either artifact is missing.

Privacy

  • Pause when secure input is detected — toggle for the password-field auto-pause rule.
  • Blocked apps — text area listing app names (one per line). Case-insensitive. Some defaults are bundled (system credential prompts, password managers, login windows).
  • Window title patterns — list of regex patterns. If the frontmost window's title matches, pause activates.
  • Browser URL patterns — list of URL regexes per supported browser. Pause activates if the active tab matches.
  • Browsers — per-browser tristate (authorized / denied / unknown) with an "Ask now" button to re-prompt the macOS Automation permission.
  • Fail closed on denied browsers — default on. When a browser is in the denied state, foregrounding it is treated as a pause trigger.
  • Show red border overlay — toggle the visual indicator while paused.
  • Purge lookback — seconds of pre-trigger captures to retroactively delete on pause. Default 5 s.

Data

  • Open data folder — reveal the per-platform data dir in Finder / Explorer.
  • View digest history — opens an inline card list of every digest the model has produced.
  • Clear Data — wipes every captured artefact: SQLite session and digest tables, screenshots, the keyframe directory, the streaming chunks directory, memory.md, and the current digest.md. Config (the API key) is preserved.
  • Reset Privacy Permissions — clears Cue's stored authorization decisions for browser / accessibility automation prompts so the OS re-asks on next launch.

About

  • App version, hotkey reminder, "Quit Cue".
  • A live count of recorded sessions.
  • Links: GitHub repo, full documentation.

Apply / Revert

The footer pair is enabled only when the in-memory draft differs from the saved snapshot and every visible field validates. Validation includes regex compilability for blocked window-title patterns and URL filter shapes.

Destructive actions (Clear Data, Reset Privacy Permissions, the per-browser "Ask now") commit immediately, bypassing the draft — those clicks are intent-to-act, not setting edits.

If you close the window with the x while a draft has unsaved edits, you'll be prompted; nothing is committed unless you press Apply.

One Preferences window only

The Preferences subprocess takes a file lock. A second launch (from the tray, the keyboard shortcut, or anywhere else) re-focuses the existing window instead of starting a new one.