Manage Settings: Complete User Guide

Video Tutorial

The Manage Settings tool is your command center for personalizing how Alter works. It lets you configure appearance, behavior, language, AI response parameters, and your professional profile—all through natural conversation with the AI.

What You Can Do

Manage Settings lets you adjust:

Your Profile & Persona – Tell Alter about your role, expertise, and preferences so it gives you more relevant responses
Appearance – Font sizes, color schemes, panel position, and UI elements
AI Behavior – Temperature (creativity vs. precision), response length, and language
Privacy & Analytics – Control data collection and screen capture visibility
Notifications & Features – Enable or disable specific suggestion rules

Enabling Manage Settings

Manage Settings is a Local Tool built into Alter, so it’s always available—no external authentication needed.

Quick Setup

Open Alter
Click the 3-dots menu and select Tools Manager
Go to the Local Tools panel
Select Atler in the grid
Find Manage Settings in the list
Click the ”+” button to enable it
Manage Settings is now active and ready to use

Once enabled, you can ask me to adjust any setting, and I’ll make the changes instantly.

Getting Started

Reading Your Current Settings

Ask me: “Show me my current Alter settings” or “What’s my temperature set to?”

I’ll retrieve your full configuration so you can see what’s currently active.

Making Changes

Simply tell me what you’d like to adjust:

“Make the text bigger”
“Switch to dark mode”
“Set my language to Spanish”
“Update my profile with my job title”
“Lower the temperature for more precise responses”

I’ll apply the changes instantly.

Key Settings Explained

Persona: Your Professional Profile

Your persona is the most powerful setting. It helps Alter understand your role, expertise, and communication style.

Example persona:

“I’m a senior software engineer specializing in cloud infrastructure and API design. I prefer concise, technical explanations with code examples. I work at Alter on the macOS AI assistant team and focus on prompt engineering and agentic workflows.”

Why it matters: With a detailed persona, Alter tailors every response to your context. It knows your technical level, preferred communication style, and domain expertise.

Temperature: Creativity vs. Precision

0.0–0.5 – Very precise, factual, consistent (use for technical tasks, data analysis, documentation)
0.7 – Balanced (default, good for most tasks)
1.0–1.5 – More creative, varied responses (use for brainstorming, content creation, ideation)
1.5–2.0 – Maximum creativity (use for experimental or highly creative work)

Max Tokens: Response Length

Controls how long Alter’s responses can be (typically 512–8192 characters). Higher values allow longer, more detailed responses.

Font Sizes: Readability

Message Font Size – Size of Alter’s responses (12–72 pixels)
Menu Font Size – Size of menu text (8–72 pixels)

Panel Position: Where Alter Appears

Choose where the Alter panel displays on your screen:

deadCenter – Center of screen
topLeft, topRight, bottomLeft, bottomRight – Corners
topCenter – Top middle
rememberLast – Stays where you last moved it

Color Scheme: Light, Dark, or System

0 – Follow your system settings
1 – Light mode
2 – Dark mode

Privacy & Security Settings

hideInScreenCapture – Hide Alter when taking screenshots or screen sharing (useful before client calls)
disableAnalytics – Turn off data collection
enableMouseWidget – Show/hide the cursor selection button
showNotch – Display or hide the notch indicator

Language Locale

Set Alter’s generation language:

en – English
fr – French
es – Spanish
de – German
it – Italian
pt – Portuguese
ja – Japanese
ko – Korean
zh – Chinese

Disabled Suggestion Rules (Notifications)

Disable specific suggestion features by ID (comma-separated list). Example: 'record-transcript,auto-save' disables those two features while keeping others active.

Best Practices

Set Your Persona First

A detailed persona is the highest-impact setting. It shapes every interaction.

How to do it:

Tell me: “Update my profile with this information: [your role, expertise, preferences]”
Or: “Add to my persona that I prefer concise technical explanations with code examples”

Privacy Before Client Calls

Before screen sharing or recording:

Enable hideInScreenCapture: true
Ask: “Enable privacy mode for my screen share”

Accessibility Adjustments

If text is hard to read:

Increase messageFontSize to 16–18
Increase menuFontSize to 14–16
Ask: “Make the text bigger for accessibility”

Optimize for Your Hardware

Using a local LLM (Ollama, LM Studio)?

Keep maxTokens moderate (512–2048) for faster responses
Ask: “Optimize settings for faster local model responses”

Common Scenarios

Scenario 1: Onboarding Your Profile

You: “Update my profile. I’m a product manager at a fintech startup. I focus on user research and roadmap prioritization. I prefer data-driven insights and concise summaries.”

Result: Alter now tailors responses to your PM context, prioritizing user impact and business metrics.

Scenario 2: Switching to Dark Mode

You: “Switch to dark mode”

Result: Alter’s interface immediately switches to dark theme.

Scenario 3: Preparing for a Client Meeting

You: “Enable privacy mode for my screen share”

Result: Alter hides from screenshots and disables analytics tracking.

Scenario 4: Boosting Creativity

You: “Increase temperature to 1.3 for more creative brainstorming”

Result: Alter’s responses become more varied and exploratory.

Scenario 5: Ingesting Best Practices

You: “I’m uploading OpenAI’s prompt engineering guide. Extract the key principles and add them to my persona.”

Result: Alter reads the file, extracts best practices, and integrates them into your profile for all future interactions.

Advanced: Programmatic Profile Enhancement

You can use Manage Settings to continuously improve your Alter experience:

Download best practice guides (OpenAI’s prompt cookbook, Anthropic’s recommendations, etc.)
Ask me to extract key insights and add them to your persona
Refine over time – Your persona becomes a living document of your expertise and preferences

This approach grounds all your AI interactions in proven principles and your unique context.

Summary

Manage Settings transforms Alter from a generic assistant into a personalized tool tailored to your role, preferences, and workflow. Start by enabling it in Local Tools, then set your persona, adjust temperature and appearance to your liking, and enable privacy settings as needed.

Ready to personalize? Just tell me what you’d like to change, and I’ll handle the rest.