Tips & Tricks

Small settings and habits that make Irrlicht noticeably more useful — most of them one toggle away, and most of them easy to never find.

Irrlicht works out of the box, so it is entirely possible to run it for months on defaults. These are the things people tend to discover by accident. Each tip says where the control lives; where a full walkthrough already exists elsewhere in these docs, the tip links to it rather than repeating it.

Where "Settings" is Click the flame in the menu bar to open the session list, then the Settings… button in the row along the bottom. Everything below labelled Settings → … lives in that panel. The web dashboard at http://127.0.0.1:7837 has its own settings panel — the ⚙ button in its header — with a subset of the same controls, so each tip notes which surfaces it applies to.

Keep the Flame Visible in Full Screen

macOS. By default macOS hides the menu bar whenever an app goes full screen — which is exactly when you are heads-down in a terminal and most want to know whether an agent is still working. Set System Settings → Control Center → "Automatically hide and show the menu bar" to Never and the flame stays visible on every Space.

Full instructions: macOS Setup → Status Line in Full Screen. Irrlicht's popover is already configured to open on any Space, so once the menu bar is visible the session list is one click away from wherever you are.

Choose What the Menu Bar Icon Shows

macOS. Under Settings → Menu Bar Icon there are three styles, and the right one depends on what you tend to run out of first:

Lights — session-state dots: how many agents are working, waiting, or ready. The default.
Usage — replaces the dots with reported subscription quota bars, so the menu bar answers "how much of my plan is left" instead.
Combined — both, side by side.

Picking anything other than Lights reveals two more controls: Quota provider (Auto, or pin it to one provider) and Quota shape (Bars or Circle). Circle is the more compact of the two if your menu bar is crowded.

Watch Your Subscription Burn Rate

macOS and web. Settings → Show Quota Forecast puts a live burn-rate forecast against your plan's cap in the popover header, in place of the app name (on the web dashboard, in place of the version chip). It is on by default on both surfaces, and the chips appear as soon as a session reports quota data — so if your header only ever shows the app name, no monitored session is reporting any.

What is worth changing is the Provider group underneath it, where you set the mode per provider (Anthropic, OpenAI): pin the one that is a subscription rather than leaving both on Auto, and the forecast stops guessing. On the web dashboard the toggle is called "Show quota forecast in header", under Provider quota.

Also worth knowing On macOS the History panel has a Quota tab showing the same per-provider rate-limit forecast in full, and it is always available — it is not gated by this toggle, which only controls the compact header readout. The web dashboard has no equivalent view.

See What a Session Costs

macOS and web. Settings → Show Estimated Cost puts a running USD estimate on each session and each project group. Estimates are approximate — they are derived from reported token counts and published prices, not from your provider invoice.

On the web dashboard the toggle is called "Show cost", and the figures themselves are buttons: click any row's cost and every row switches to an estimated CO₂ footprint instead; click any group header's cost and every group cycles the time frame it is summed over (day → week → month → year). Both are global and both are remembered across reloads. See CO2 Methodology for how the footprint is derived.

Let Irrlicht Tell You, So You Can Look Away

macOS. The single highest-value setting for anyone running more than one agent. Under Settings → Notifications, enable notifications and then configure each of the three events independently:

Agent ready — the agent finished its turn.
Agent waiting for input — it is blocked on you.
Context pressure alert — the session is approaching its context limit.

Each event gets its own sound from a single picker: one of the built-ins (Ping, Chime, Funk, Whoosh, Sosumi), None, a Custom audio file…, or — the part people miss — one of the three spoken options, Speak aloud (Default), Speak aloud (Zoe, Premium) and Speak aloud (Jamie, Premium), which read the message out instead of chiming. Spoken alerts mean you can leave the screen entirely and still know which agent needs you. There is a ▶ preview button next to each picker so you can audition a sound without waiting for the event.

Context pressure alert adds an Alert at threshold you set in either % or raw tokens — so you can be warned at 80% and still have room to wrap up or compact deliberately, instead of being surprised.

The Context pressure alert row in Irrlicht Settings: the event toggle switched on, the sound set to Speak aloud (Zoe, Premium) with a preview button, and an Alert at threshold of 80 percent.

The web dashboard has the three notification toggles too, but no per-event sounds and no spoken alerts — those are macOS-only. If macOS never asks for notification permission, or you denied it once, see macOS Setup → Notification Permissions.

Click a Session to Jump Straight to It

macOS. Session rows in the popover are not just readouts — clicking one brings the terminal or editor window that owns that session to the front. With several agents running across several windows, this replaces the entire "which window was that in" hunt.

It needs the macOS Accessibility permission granted once (macOS Setup → Accessibility Permission (Window Focus)); without it, focusing works for some terminals and silently fails for others. If you use Kitty, two lines in kitty.conf let Irrlicht land on the exact tab rather than just the window — see Kitty Terminal — Precise Tab Focus.

macOS only Click-to-jump has no web equivalent — a browser tab cannot raise another application's window. On the web dashboard, clicking a row does nothing; it is the cost figures and group headers that are clickable.

Dig Into Usage History — and Export It

macOS and web. On macOS, the History panel's Usage tab is a full analytics surface, not just a chart. Three compact pickers along the top drive it: a time range, the metric to chart (cost, tokens, CO₂, and more), and what to group by — project, branch, provider, model, session, or token type. They carry no labels on macOS and the group names are abbreviated (Proj, Branch, Prov, Model, Sess, Type), which is why they are easy to overlook; the web dashboard spells the same three out as Range, Chart and Group.

Click a segment to drill into it: project → branch → session answers "what did this feature actually cost me", and provider → model → session answers "which model is eating the budget". Export CSV and Export JSON buttons sit under the chart, so any view you can build you can also hand to a spreadsheet or a script.

The History panel's Usage tab: a stacked cumulative cost chart broken down by project with a dashed projection, a month-to-date total of $18.35 with a projected $20.64, a per-project legend, and Export CSV and Export JSON buttons.

The web dashboard exposes the same chart and grouping controls in a single History panel (with export buttons labelled just CSV and JSON) rather than as separate tabs.

Tame the List When Several Agents Ask at Once

macOS and web. A session that is waiting shows the question it is blocked on inline, so you can answer the right agent without opening every window. When four agents ask at once that is a lot of text, so both surfaces let you collapse them: on macOS the summary display control switches between collapsed and question-showing, and on the web dashboard the header has a Collapse all pending questions button.

Sessions that are working or ready deliberately show no question pill — the text only appears when there is something to answer.

Answer for Yourself — Automatically

macOS. Settings → Advanced Settings → Backchannel (control sessions) — marked beta in the app — lets Irrlicht send input and interrupts into a running session through its terminal backend (tmux, kitty, …), instead of you switching to that window. It is off by default, and each agent additionally needs the control permission granted — consent-first, like everything else Irrlicht touches.

Turning it on reveals a Rules editor: an event (Waiting, Ready, Working, Context (%), Context (tokens)), an optional agent filter, and an action (Send a response, or Interrupt). The classic rule is the one below — compact automatically at 85% context, so a long-running agent never stalls waiting for you to notice.

The Backchannel Rules editor with a rule named Auto-compact: when Context (%) is greater than or equal to 85, for any agent, send the response Compact.

It really does type for you A rule sends real input to a real session. Start with one narrow rule, watch it fire once, and only then add more. Backchannel has no web dashboard equivalent.

Script It

Everything the UIs show comes from the daemon's HTTP API on http://127.0.0.1:7837, and it is yours to query. irrlicht-ls prints the same hierarchical session view from the shell — handy in a status line, a tmux bar, or a cron check — and works anywhere the daemon does. irrlicht-focus <sessionID> raises a session's window from a script or a hotkey; it asks the daemon to broadcast the request, and the macOS app is what actually performs the raise, so it is a no-op without that app running.

If irrlicht-ls is not on your PATH — DMG installs do not symlink it — use Settings → Advanced Settings → Command-Line Tool → Install Command-Line Tool (the button only appears while it is not installed). See CLI Tools for every binary and API Reference for the endpoints behind them.