The Settings pages
Open Settings with Ctrl , or the Settings button at the foot of the sidebar. A short list down the left holds one line per subject, in five groups: Account, Assistant, Chat, Mosaics and App. A subject with several pages shows them as tabs under its name, and it opens on the tab you used last. Each page opens with what it's for, and a ? beside a technical label explains the word. Settings most people never need are folded under one Advanced settings at the bottom of a page, with how many there are.
| Account | OpenRouter: Sign in with OpenRouter (or Sign out), what free and paid models mean, your own key with whether it's remembered, Test connection and the steps for getting one. |
|---|---|
| Cost | Spending: what you've spent, the daily and monthly limits, and the switch for paid models. Saving: how hard Mosaik works to spend less, how it saves money at every setting, and each detail under Advanced, including letting the chat's model call in a stronger one for a hard question. |
| Models | Smart and Manual: the mode, Cost and Speed to Intelligence, and what Smart would use now for messages, pictures, video, voice, music and its helpers. Jobs: Smart, limits of its own or one model for each job, and the models that help: the stronger model on call, the file reader, the summarizer of long chats, read aloud. Saved setups: setups for the model menu, Smart with controls of their own or one model. Privacy: skip providers that train on or store prompts, use only zero-data-retention providers, prefer or never use providers picked from OpenRouter's list, and a rule of its own for one saved setup or one model. Model settings: the maximum answer length, adjusting the rest to each task, retrying with another model when one fails, and every setting sent to the model, like temperature. |
| Instructions | Custom instructions for every chat, with Mosaik's built-in instructions and the maximum answer length under Advanced. Memory: what Mosaik remembers about you, to edit, delete or add to, whether it saves memories automatically and whether it searches past chats. See Memory. |
| Answers | Styled answers: how much styling answers get, and whether they use Mosaik's colours and animate (see Styled answers). Web search: search on or off, fast web search, reading the top pages in full, and under Advanced, your own SearXNG and more engines. Files: what happens when a model can't take a file, the model that reads for it, when a long paste becomes a file, and how pictures the model makes are drawn. |
| Chats | General: how Enter sends, how new chats start, archiving, Archived and Recently deleted. Message box: suggested replies. Long chats: summarizing older messages instead of dropping them (see Long chats and context). Working: the steps one message may take, how many chats work at once, whether each stretch of thinking is summed up in a few words, and the reminders waiting (see Bigger tasks). Notifications: what happens when a long answer finishes while you're in another window (see When a long answer is ready). |
| Voice | How answers are read aloud: your computer's voice or a speech model. See Voice. |
| Appearance | Five tabs, each with a preview and a reset arrow beside every setting changed, and Reset all. Theme: the same as Windows, Light, Dark or Mosaik (colours from the scene that is up, light or dark with its picture or always one, with switches for the colours, one room over the scene, the scene behind chats and its strength, and liquid glass), and the accent colour. Scenes: Auto, Off or one scene; how often Auto changes (now and then, every hour, three, six, or once a day), which scenes it leaves out, seasons and celebrations, and the hemisphere. Text and layout: Compact or Comfortable, message layout (bubbles or flat), text size, spacing, reading width, and fonts and code under Advanced. Motion: Full, Calm or Off, how much the scene catches the light under the pointer, and under Advanced a switch for each small detail (messages arriving, the thinking star, done with tiles, strips setting, cards catching the light, answer ornaments, glass edges). Windows: blur behind windows, tips and the setup guide, and under Advanced how the window is drawn. |
| Window and keyboard | Window: zoom and starting with Windows. Keyboard: every shortcut, to change. Ask from anywhere: the shortcut, what comes along, the model that answers, and keeping Mosaik in the tray (see Ask from anywhere). |
| Backup and transfer | Back up and restore everything, or move your settings. |
| About and updates | Your version, how updates happen, Check now, Report a problem, and Give feedback or suggest a feature. |
Finding a setting
The search at the top of the list (Ctrl F while Settings is open) looks through every page: each setting, switch and button, and what it says about itself. It knows other words for things, so dark mode finds the theme, budget finds Spending and hotkey finds Ask from anywhere, and it forgives a typo.
Results are grouped by page, and the list shows how many each page has. Click one, or use the arrow keys and Enter, and its page opens with the setting lit up, Advanced unfolded if that's where it lives. Esc clears the search. When nothing matches, Ask in a chat starts a chat where the assistant finds the setting and proposes the change.
Files
Settings › Answers › Files decides how the files you attach reach a model, and how the files a model makes are built. The defaults are automatic; change them when you want control.
- When a model can't take a file, another model reads it first. Turn that off, or choose the model that reads. Its cost shows as Reading files under Spending.
- When both are possible, prefer another model reading the file, or converting it here, like sending a PDF's text instead of pictures of its pages.
- Turn long pastes into a file at 4,000 characters. Set any length, or never.
- Files the AI makes. Mosaik builds them from what the model writes, or has another model make them: an image model draws the pictures. Drawing shows as Making files under Spending.
Under Advanced, choose whether PDFs go as themselves to models that read them or always as text, and whether Mosaik uses FFmpeg and LibreOffice when they're installed.
Instructions
Custom instructions go with every chat: who you are, what you do, how you like answers. Keep them short and specific.
Every chat also starts with Mosaik's built-in instructions, which you don't have to write: today's date, when to search, and how to write a clear answer (the answer first, length to fit the question, no flattery or filler). Your instructions come after them and win wherever the two disagree. To send only your own, turn off Include Mosaik's built-in instructions under Advanced.
Maximum answer length, temperature and every other setting sent to the model are in Settings › Models › Model settings. The longest answer is 16,384 tokens to start with; an answer that reaches it stops with Continue under it (see Answers that stop early). Lower temperature is focused and predictable, higher is more varied.
Settings › Chats › Long chats decides what happens when a chat outgrows the model: older messages are summarized, with the latest kept word for word. It sets how full the model's window gets first (80% to start with) and how much to keep. Under Advanced: Message limit, how much of the conversation goes with each request (40 to start with, or all). Who writes the summaries, the chat's own model or the Quick jobs model, is chosen in Settings › Models › Jobs.
One chat's own settings
Ctrl /, or the Chat settings button at the top, beside the Chat and Mosaics tabs, gives the open chat its own model, instructions, temperature and answer length. Anything you leave on the default follows Settings. While a chat has settings of its own, the button shows a dot and the message box a Custom tag.
A branch starts with the same settings as the chat it came from.
The prompt library
The prompt library keeps what you'd otherwise type again and again. Open it from the message box's … menu or the palette. Each prompt has a name and is used one of two ways:
- A message, like “Explain {topic} simply”. Type / in an empty message box and your messages come first. Blanks in curly brackets are filled in each time. See Prompts.
- Chat instructions, like “Translator” or “Code reviewer”, given to a chat from its settings. Deleting one doesn't take it away from the chats that already use it.
Right-click a prompt, or use its … menu, to use it now, duplicate it or delete it. An empty library offers Add a few examples to start from. Changes are kept when you click Done.
Changing settings from a chat
Ask in any chat, in your own words: “make it cheaper”, “use Claude for everything”, “stop searching the web”, “set a $5 monthly limit”. The assistant reads your settings and the models your key can use, then proposes the changes on a card under its answer. Nothing changes until you press Apply; untick any change to leave it out, and Undo puts everything back.
It can only propose settings on a fixed list, and never sees your key. It costs what the chat's answer costs.
The setup guide and tips
The first time Mosaik opens, a window of five pages walks through it, each page with a short demonstration over its settings: the theme, how answers sound and look (tone, emojis, styling and custom instructions), Smart's Cost, Read messages while you type and Search the web when it helps. Start keeps what it shows and Skip keeps the defaults. Everything in it is also in Settings.
The setup guide opens on first launch: signing in with OpenRouter, your models, a monthly limit and a quick tour. Open the setup guide in Settings › Account › OpenRouter or Appearance runs it again. When a new version adds something worth knowing, the guide comes back once as What's new, showing only the new steps.
Short tips appear in the corner the first few times you use each part of Mosaik. Settings › Appearance can turn them off, or show them all again.
Pictures and greetings
The pill in the corner of the New Chat page picks its picture: Auto follows the time of day, or pick one of the four to keep it. The same window has Personal greetings: now and then, the greeting mentions something from your recent chats. To write those, the titles of your recent chats are sent to your chat model a few times a day at most. Turn it off there if you'd rather they weren't.
How the window is drawn
Settings › Appearance › Windows › Advanced › Web engine chooses what draws the window. Automatic uses WebView2, the web engine Windows keeps up to date, which stays smooth even on older laptops. On a PC without it, or where it failed before, Mosaik uses the engine it comes with, Qt WebEngine. You can also pick either yourself. The setting says which one drew the window and why, and a change takes effect after a restart.
Drawing, below it, chooses how Qt WebEngine reaches the screen when it draws the window. Automatic uses OpenGL, which can't show a half-drawn frame, and Direct3D on a PC where OpenGL can't draw the window, such as over a remote desktop. Mosaik checks that once for each graphics card and driver, and the setting says which one it picked and why. You can also pick Direct3D or OpenGL yourself. Software never flickers but is slower. The change takes effect after a restart.
Check for flicker, below it, counts the frames your PC shows half-drawn in the mode Mosaik started in, and Copy details copies what a report of flicker needs: your graphics card, its driver and Windows' drawing settings.