New Settings layout (the reorganized rooms)

What it is

What it is

The New Settings layout reorganizes the Settings screen into clearer, better-named "rooms" — top-level groups that gather related settings together. It changes only the grouping, labels, and order of the settings nav; it does not add, remove, or change any individual setting. Every setting that existed before still exists, in the same form — it just lives in a more sensibly-named room.

It shipped as the default layout for everyone on 2026-07-28 (the settings-IA redesign). The legacy six-group layout is kept for one release as a fallback and is then removed.

Where to find it

The Settings screen itself — the layout is what you see when you open it. The control that returns you to the older grouping is a New Settings layout entry inside Settings.

How it behaves

Why it changed

The old Settings grouping had grown organically and mixed unrelated things under broad buckets. The rooms layout is a flatter, plainer-language reorganization so a setting is easier to find by what it does rather than by an internal category name.

The rooms

The nav opens with the pinned Home landing row, then groups the sections into the six top-level groups from the settings-redesign prototype (plus an owner-only Team & Admin room):

• General — appearance, notifications, system, widgets, and backup & restore (plus Team Chat notifications when that feature is on).
• Agents — how your sessions run and everything that drives them: sessions, workflow, inbox, performance, accounts, API keys, plan & billing, AI Coach, Plain Speak, CLI Control, automations, agent instructions, tags, code review, and features.
• Apps — the first-party apps Omniscio hosts itself (Arij, JLS Image Studio, Mission Control, Ollert).
• Connections — outside services Omniscio talks to (channels, email, Google Workspace, storage providers, meeting rooms) plus remote access, sharing, SSH remotes, deploy profiles, and the PR merge queue.
• Input — keyboard shortcuts, Quick Launch, and voice control.
• System — power-user tools and upkeep (connected tools, plugins, ContextDock, OpenClaw, council templates, Lab, diagnostics, support chat, and Setup Wizards / AutoHotKey where available).
• Team & Admin — owner-only member management and broadcasts.

System and Team & Admin start collapsed on a fresh install (upkeep and owner-only buckets that are rarely visited). This is a regroup only — the section ids and per-item labels are identical to the previous layout, so every deep link, search entry, and UI-anchor keeps working; only the grouping, group labels, and order changed.

Multi-level drill-down navigation

The same redesign also changes how you move through Settings. Instead of one long scrolling list of every section, Settings opens to a category picker: you pick a category (a room), then the page within it — a two-level drill-down with a breadcrumb back to the top. Turning on the multi-level navigation also enables the room grouping described above, so the two travel together. It shipped as the default for everyone on 2026-08-03, after the category-picker polish landed (untruncated titles, two-line subtitles, a smaller chevron, and a wider sidebar). Nothing about any individual setting changes — only the path you take to reach it — and Settings search still jumps straight to any setting, skipping the drill-down entirely.

Settings redesign — tabbed pages

Building on the rooms layout, the Settings redesign splits each large settings page into focused tabs at the top of the page, so a normal person sees a handful of relevant settings per tab instead of one long scroll. The converted pages are Appearance (Theme & Visual · Sidebar · Text · Motion & Polish · Layout Mods), Sessions (Behavior · Display · Waiting · Cost · Custom Render), and Voice & Speech, each with the aggressive Basic/Advanced split and, on a couple of settings, a live preview. See settings-redesign.md for the full page.

It is shipped as the default for everyone — there is no toggle (the former Lab preview toggle is retired; the settingsRedesignEnabled key is kept only so older configs still parse). Quick-setup presets remain a separate in-development feature. Under the hood each tabbed page is a small "hub" built on the shared SettingsTabStrip (the same primitive the Inbox, Notifications, Keyboard, Email, and Automations hubs already use): it mounts only the active tab, and a Settings-search result or settings:// deep link opens the tab that holds the target setting so it scrolls into view. With the flag off, every page renders exactly as before.

What still works unchanged

Because only the grouping changed and the section ids are identical to the old layout, everything that addressed a section keeps working: Settings deep links, Settings search, the UI-anchor targets the AI-highlight feature points at, and legacy section aliases all resolve to the same panels as before.

Turning it off

The layout is governed by a setting so you can return to the legacy grouping while it is still available (the old layout is removed one release after the rooms layout becomes the default). Look for the New Settings layout control in Settings; toggling it off restores the previous six-group nav without touching any of your actual settings values.

Related

• open-settings.md — getting to Settings and jumping straight to one section.
• settings-reference.md — the settings themselves, by name.