In-session settings

Run /settings to change how Kiro responds, looks, and behaves — output style, colors, keyboard shortcuts, multi-line input, display toggles, feature toggles, and prompt history scope — without leaving your chat session. Run /settings on its own to open the menu, or jump straight to a subcommand with /settings <subcommand>.

Available subcommands: theme, keybindings, terminal, display, features, and history.

Every settings menu shares the same controls. Up and Down move between rows. Left reverses a toggle or cycle. Right and Enter toggle or cycle a value, select a radio option, or open a navigation row, and Enter also runs action rows. Esc closes the top-level menu or returns from a submenu. These controls apply to /settings, Display, Status line, Theme, and /verbosity. In /verbosity, Ctrl+X cycles the preview through hidden, mini, and expanded.

In a V3 session, run /settings display and use the Output style row to choose how Kiro formats responses. The available styles come from the active agent when the Display menu opens, so an upgraded agent can supply new choices without a CLI update.

Your selection is saved as the global chat.outputStyle preference and applies to subsequent prompts. Choosing the agent's default removes the global override. A workspace-level chat.outputStyle value continues to take precedence; in that case, the row shows the active workspace style while you edit the global default.

Customize the colors used for prompt input and agent response text. The theme wizard walks you through customization step by step — pick a base theme, adjust specific elements, then confirm. The live preview renders actual conversation output so you see exactly how your theme looks in practice.

/settings theme

The theme system uses named ANSI colors, so your customizations render correctly across terminals with different color palettes. Falls back to safe ANSI colors when terminal color detection has low confidence.

View the current keyboard shortcut configuration. This is a read-only reference showing all configurable bindings and their current values.

/settings keybindings

To change keybindings, use the kiro-cli settings command:

kiro-cli settings chat.keybindings.cancelStream "ctrl+x"
kiro-cli settings chat.keybindings.closeMenu "ctrl+["
kiro-cli settings chat.keybindings.quit "ctrl+shift+q"

See Key bindings (terminal UI) for the full reference.

Enable Shift+Enter and Option+Enter as newline shortcuts in your terminal. If pressing Shift+Enter currently submits your prompt instead of inserting a newline, this command fixes it by auto-detecting your terminal and applying the appropriate key binding configuration.

/settings terminal

Terminals that need configuration (auto-applied by /settings terminal):

• VS Code integrated terminal
• Alacritty
• Zed
• Apple Terminal

Terminals with native support (no configuration needed):

• iTerm2
• Kitty
• Ghostty
• WezTerm
• Warp

For terminals that don't support automatic configuration, Kiro shows manual workaround instructions.

tmux users: Add both lines to your tmux.conf for Shift+Enter to pass through correctly:

set -s extended-keys on
set -as terminal-features 'xterm*:extkeys'

Toggle visual features for accessibility or personal preference, using the menu controls above.

/settings display

Available toggles:

• Output style (V3) — choose how Kiro formats responses; the active agent supplies the available styles
• Animations (chat.allowAnimations) — when off, spinners and shimmers show static frames instead of animating
• ASCII art (chat.allowAsciiArt) — when off, replaces braille dots, box-drawing, and Unicode symbols with plain ASCII
• Icons (chat.allowIcons) — when off, hides status indicator icons (●, ○, ⚠) in favor of text-only labels
• Show thinking (chat.showThinking) — when off, hides the agent's reasoning blocks from chat output
• Status line — choose whether the status line shows the date, time, current usage percentage, and remaining credits. These optional segments are hidden by default. Changes take effect immediately and persist across sessions
• Terminal title — when on, sets the terminal window title from a custom name you provide with /title. Enable from /settings display
• Preserve scrollback: when on, keeps terminal history available during overflow and resize redraws

Animations, ASCII art, icons, and status-line changes take effect immediately. The Show thinking toggle is startup-only — it persists right away, but the change applies to your next chat session. See Thinking display below.

Enable account-available agent features for future Kiro CLI processes.

/settings features

Enable Workflows to expose declarative workflow commands and controls. The choice is stored as chat.enableWorkflows. Exit and restart Kiro CLI after changing it; the current process does not add or remove workflow commands dynamically.

When Workflows are enabled in V3, Workflows: sub-agent tool appears directly below the Workflows toggle. It is on by default, so the main chat can delegate directly to sub-agents or through Workflows. Turn it off to make Workflows the main chat's only delegation route; workflow steps can still use sub-agents when their agent configuration permits them. The choice is stored as chat.enableMainAgentSubagentTool and applies to new sessions.

If Workflows does not appear, it is not available for your account. See Workflows for recipes, commands, and run behavior.

Choose whether prompt history (the Up/Down arrow recall in the input) is tracked per session or shared across all sessions.

/settings history

Options:

• session (default) — each chat session keeps its own prompt history, so Up/Down only recalls prompts from the current session
• global — all sessions share a single prompt history

The change is written to chat.historyMode and takes effect on your next session.

When the agent reasons through a complex request, it can stream those reasoning ("thinking") blocks inline above its response. This is controlled by the chat.showThinking setting, which is enabled by default in Kiro CLI 2.5.0 and later.

Toggle it from the display menu:

/settings display
# Select "Show thinking" and press Enter to toggle

Or set it directly from the command line:

# Hide reasoning blocks
kiro-cli settings chat.showThinking false

# Show reasoning blocks again
kiro-cli settings chat.showThinking true

A few things to know:

• The setting is startup-only. Changes apply to your next chat session, not the current one.
• The live "Thinking..." spinner always appears while the agent is processing, regardless of this setting.
• Long reasoning traces collapse to a tail view. Press Ctrl+O to expand or collapse the full thinking block.
• Reasoning blocks typically appear for complex, multi-step requests. Simple prompts may not produce any.

Preferences changed through /settings persist across sessions. Most are saved to ~/.kiro/settings/cli.json, while theme preferences are saved to ~/.kiro/settings/kiro_cli_theme.json. You can edit the main settings file directly with kiro-cli settings open.

Your /model selection applies to the current session only. To save the current model as the default for future sessions, run /model set-current-as-default; Kiro stores the default in ~/.kiro/settings/cli.json.

Effort works differently. Choosing a level in the /model picker persists it for that model. Using /effort <level> directly changes the current session only — run /effort set-current-as-default afterward to save it, or choose the level in /model instead. In V3, the --effort flag applies only to the session Kiro starts with.

Per-model effort defaults live under chat.modelDefaults. See Effort for the full reference.

• Settings reference — full list of all CLI settings
• Terminal UI — terminal UI features and configuration
• Configuration — configuration file paths and scopes
• Workflows — enable and run declarative workflows