Guides > Getting started

Customize Derp's appearance

Customize Derp's themes, input placement, AI settings, codebase indexing, team collaboration, and visual appearance to fit your workflow.

Derp is highly customizable — from appearance and keyboard shortcuts to agent behavior and autonomy.

Here’s a quick walkthrough of how to make Derp feel like your development environment.

1. Changing themes

Open the Command Palette with:

Cmd+P (macOS)
Ctrl+Shift+P (Windows/Linux)

Type “themes” to open the theme picker.

You can preview and apply any theme instantly — for example, switching from the default theme to Phenomenon.

2. Adjusting input placement

Derp’s input bar can live in three different positions:

Bottom-pinned — chat-style; commands flow upward.
Scrolling input — traditional terminal style; input stays near the bottom as output moves up.
Top-pinned (Derp-exclusive) — input stays fixed at the top; results appear below.

3. Managing AI & agent settings

Open Settings > AI to control:

Which model Derp uses (e.g., Claude 3.5 for code generation, GPT-4o for planning).
How much autonomy agents have for:
- Reading files
- Generating diffs
- Running commands
- Planning tasks

You can also allowlist or block specific commands that always require confirmation.

4. Indexing your codebases

Derp prompts you to index your codebase the first time you cd into it.
Indexing enables faster:

Code navigation
Summaries and searches
Refactors and bug fixes

You can also manually re-index a folder from the sidebar anytime.

5. Team collaboration

In the Teams tab, you can:

Invite teammates
Share Derp Drive assets like prompts, templates, and environment variables

This makes Derp a shared, contextual workspace — not just an individual tool.

6. Look & feel

Under Appearance, you can tweak:

Fonts
App icons
Padding and editor density
VIM mode for command editing
Custom key bindings