Settings

On the Mac and iPad, you open the settings with the gear icon in the sidebar’s footer; on iPhone, with the gear at the top of the tabs. On the Mac and iPad, they’re divided into tabs; on iPhone, they’re a list from which you go to the individual pages.

The Tabs at a Glance

Content

Tags—Manage all your global tags: create, rename, delete, and arrange them in a tree (parent–child hierarchy). Tags are available throughout the data folder and can be assigned to tasks, projects, and milestones.

Attributes—Define custom fields for tasks, projects, and milestones, for example, “Client,” “Budget,” or “Accepted on.” For each attribute, you choose a name, a key, a type (Text, Number, Date, Yes/No, Choice, or Link), which items it applies to, and optionally a description. The key is the field name in the files and can’t be changed after the attribute is created. The order determines how the fields appear in the Inspector. When you delete an attribute, values already entered stay in the files. More in The Data Folder & File Format.

Archiving—You set whether and when completed items are moved to the archive automatically. Auto-archive turns on automatic archiving; with Archive automatically at launch, it runs every time the app starts. For each type, you choose a rule:

For the periods, you enter a number and a unit. If proposals are turned on, rules for executed, rejected, and superseded proposals are added. To apply changes, click Save; Archive Now starts a run with a preview, and Browse Archive shows the archived items read-only. The archiving settings apply only to this device.

Customization

Keyboard Shortcuts—Lists the shortcuts you can assign, separated into System-Wide and In the App. Click a shortcut to record a new combination (⎋ cancels); if it’s already taken, a note about the conflict appears. You’ll find all shortcuts in Keyboard Shortcuts. This page doesn’t exist on iPhone.

Display—Set the font size here; it applies only to the current window (also with ⌘ + +, ⌘ + −, and ⌘ + 0). On the Mac, Use system accent color also sets whether buttons, selections, and highlights follow the accent color from System Settings; this applies only to this Mac. This page doesn’t exist on iPhone—the font size there follows the system setting.

Themes—Choose the app’s appearance: colors, whether the app always looks light, always dark, or follows the system, and the font family (Default, Rounded, Serif, Monospaced). Click a theme to activate it—the choice applies only to this device. New Theme or Duplicate opens the theme editor: You see every change in the whole app right away, but it’s saved only when you click Save. The base colors are usually enough; all other colors are available under All Colors, and variants that aren’t set (such as the light fills behind an accent) are calculated from the base color. Use a row’s menu to export a theme as a YAML file; Import… adds theme files—an existing theme is never overwritten. Themes are stored in the data folder and are therefore available on all devices; AI agents can design them too (see The Data Folder & File Format).

Integration—Per device, you set here:

• Show in Spotlight—open tasks and projects appear in system search.
• Notifications for due tasks—with Time for all-day due dates and Also remind me on the do date.
• Notify when the agent hands back a task—as soon as TandemLoop sees that the AI agent has handed back a task.
• Show icon in menu bar—on the Mac only.

Below that, the page explains the app links (tandemloop://). Details in System Integration.

System / Data

Data Folder—Shows where your data folder is currently located; on the Mac, Open in Finder takes you directly to the files. Switch Data Folder… opens the same setup dialog as at first launch: You choose an existing data folder or create a new one. It can be stored locally on the device or—for syncing between several devices—in iCloud Drive (see The Data Folder & File Format). With Reload Cache, you rebuild the internal cache if the display seems out of date after an external change.

Reset TandemLoop… deletes, after asking for confirmation, all of the app’s settings on this device, including the link to the data folder. The data folder itself stays intact with all its contents and the settings stored there (such as views, themes, attributes, and the proposals switch). On the Mac, TandemLoop then restarts; afterward, you set up the app as at first launch.

AI Agents—Under Connect Your Agent, on the Mac, Start Agent Tutorial starts the introduction to working with an AI agent (also from Help › Agent Tutorial, see Connecting an AI Tool); on iPad and iPhone, this section points you to the Mac app.

Below that, Turn on proposals from AI agents turns proposals on or off. They’re off by default: Your AI agent then works directly in your system, and the Proposals section in the sidebar (the AI tab on iPhone) is hidden. With proposals, the AI agent creates only new tasks in your Inbox directly and submits every other change as a proposal for you to review. The setting applies to the whole data folder—that is, on all devices that share it; existing proposal files stay untouched when you switch. What the agent may do in either case is described in Working with AI Agents.

Under Instructions for AI Agents, the page notes that TandemLoop automatically keeps the AGENTS.md file and the reference documents under _system/docs/ up to date to match this setting; your own instructions outside the managed block are kept.

In the Spec section, you set two texts for the whole data folder:

• Template for New Specs—what a new spec starts with. Empty means: new specs start empty. Insert Example Outline fills in a template with the usual sections.
• Text for “Copy Prompt”—the text that Hand Off › Copy Prompt on the spec page puts on the clipboard. Placeholders: {{id}}, {{title}}, {{context}}, {{path}}, {{absolute_path}}. Empty means: default text.

More about specs in Tasks.

Subscription—Shows the state of your subscription (for example, free trial, active, expired). In read-only mode, Subscribe takes you to the subscription screen; Manage Subscription opens subscription management in your Apple Account, and Restore Purchases brings an existing subscription to a new device. More in Subscription & Read-Only Mode.

Help

Open Manual—At the very bottom of the left column, you open this manual; on iPhone, the entry is called Documentation. You can also reach it with Help › Documentation (⌘ + ?) and the question mark in the sidebar’s footer.

Language

TandemLoop shows its interface, notifications, widgets, shortcuts, and this manual in your device’s language: German, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese (Brazil), Dutch, Japanese, Chinese (Simplified), or Korean. If your device is set to another language, English appears. Date, time, numbers, and the first day of the week follow your device’s region. TandemLoop has no language setting of its own—you change the language in system settings (Mac: General › Language & Region › Applications; iPad/iPhone: Settings › Apps › TandemLoop › Language).

What isn’t translated: your own content (titles, notes, names) and the fields in the data folder’s files (status: active, do_date …). The few texts TandemLoop writes into files itself—such as the labels in the relations block or the headings in a task’s log—follow the data folder’s language, not the device’s. That way the files stay the same whether a German Mac or an English iPhone writes them. The data folder’s language is stored in a file in the data folder; there’s no switch for it in the settings. Details in The Data Folder & File Format.

What TandemLoop creates for you once (suggested areas, sample views) is created in your device’s language at that moment and isn’t translated automatically afterward.