Settings
Settings opens from the sidebar. Six tabs.
| Tab | What you do here |
|---|---|
| Models | Change the LLM and ASR providers, enter API keys, pick local Ollama chat models, edit the Chat Launcher prompt templates. Embedding-only models such as nomic-embed-text are managed from Meeting index instead. |
| Audio | Pick the microphone input device. The default leaves the mic unset so Gistlist can auto-pick a physical microphone at recording time, avoiding virtual loopback devices such as BlackHole. Toggle Apple voice processing — Apple’s built-in echo cancellation, AGC, and noise suppression on the mic. Off by default; the engine’s offline AEC handles most setups. Turn on if your built-in speakers bleed heavily into the mic and the offline pass isn’t enough. |
| Meeting index | Install the embedding model (nomic-embed-text) and check the local search index used by Claude Desktop MCP. The health panel shows whether meetings are indexed, pending, keyword-only, or waiting on sqlite-vec. |
| Integrations | Install or remove the Gistlist MCP server entry for Claude Desktop; live status for Claude Desktop, Ollama, and the meeting index. |
| Storage | Change the data folder, toggle Obsidian and pick a vault, choose audio storage mode and audio retention. |
| Other | Your name (used to personalize meeting summaries via {{user_name}} — see below), system health checks (with one-click install for missing dependencies), auto-update preferences, “Run setup again” to relaunch the wizard non-destructively, support links and logs. |
Where things live
Section titled “Where things live”API keys go into the macOS Keychain under the service name gistlist. App preferences live in ~/.gistlist/config.yaml, the Prompt Library lives in ~/.gistlist/prompts/, and the local search index lives in ~/.gistlist/meetings.db.
You can edit config.yaml by hand, but the safer path is to use the tabs — they validate inputs and trigger the right setup steps when you change a provider or vault.
Meeting index health
Section titled “Meeting index health”The Meeting index tab checks the search index that Claude Desktop uses through the Gistlist MCP server. When everything is healthy, it reports that your meetings are indexed and searchable.
If a meeting has not been indexed yet, use Index pending meetings. If a meeting was indexed while Ollama was unavailable, it may be searchable by keyword only; after Ollama is running again, use Re-embed to restore semantic search for those meetings.
If sqlite-vec is unavailable, Gistlist can still keep the keyword index current, but semantic search is disabled until sqlite-vec loads successfully.
Your name
Section titled “Your name”The Other tab has a free-form Your name field. This value is substituted into the default summary.md prompt wherever {{user_name}} appears, so the AI knows who is being summarized for. First name is fine; anything works. Leave it blank to use a generic “the user” in summaries.
The wizard captures this on first run as an optional step, but you can also set or change it here at any time.
Privacy: when a prompt runs on Claude or OpenAI, your name is sent as part of the prompt to that provider. With Ollama it stays on your machine. Each prompt can target its own model in frontmatter, so what matters is which model the prompt runs on — not just your default LLM provider.
Activity
Section titled “Activity”Activity is a separate sidebar page, not a Settings tab. Use it for engine health, the job queue, cancellable processing jobs, app logs, job logs, and the Ollama log reveal button.