Workspace

The commands that shape BEAM itself: appearance, input surfaces, voice, encryption status, your account, and the direct line to the team.

settings

Aliases: none
Purpose: Open settings, or toggle AI access to workspace data.
Syntax:

>settings
>settings ai-context on|off

Flags: none
Examples:

>settings
>settings ai-context off

See also: skin, privacy

The full settings surface lives behind the gear icon in the status bar — see the Settings reference page. ai-context off stops every AI path from receiving your tasks, projects, lists, docs, memories and attachments. ask, council, debate, consensus, Spotlight and voice keep working on general knowledge; the commands that exist only to read your workspace (brief, triage, plan, workflow, consolidate, portrait, research brief/refresh/summary/ask/probe, and deep pointed at a task, at all, or at a document) refuse instead of sending a stripped-down version. Background passes — memory extraction, idle observations, archive retrospectives, team standup analysis — are skipped. Your question still goes to the provider — that is the AI call. Nothing else does: saved messages are not sent, and neither is the running conversation, so on ask, council, debate, consensus and Spotlight the assistant answers each turn cold and will not remember the one before it. (A voice call keeps the turns of that call, which are session-local and never touch the store.) When a command answers without your workspace, it says so on its own line — "Answering without your workspace — ai-context is off" — on ask (both the default and --just), in bin/beam, and at the start of a voice call. You never have to infer it from a thin answer, and it is BEAM printing the line, not the model being asked to mention it.

skin

Aliases: theme
Purpose: Switch the UI skin.
Syntax:

>skin terminal|studio|light

Flags: none
Examples:

>skin studio

See also: settings, shell

Terminal is the monospace CLI-first dark default; Studio is deep navy with glass panels; Light is low-glare grey. All features work identically in every skin.

shell

Aliases: none
Purpose: Choose the layout: current shell, the Unified Surface, or the classic terminal.
Syntax:

>shell
>shell legacy on|off
>shell unified on|off

Flags: none
Examples:

>shell legacy on
>shell legacy off
>shell unified on
>shell unified off

See also: skin, settings

shell legacy on gives you the classic terminal layout — the older shell for keyboard-first users. Everything still works: the same commands, the same terminal, the same ⌘K Spotlight. What is hidden is the newer chrome — the lens switcher and the left project tree. shell unified on turns on the Unified Surface, the shell BEAM is moving to: Team, Projects, Channels, DMs and Agents side by side, with the same terminal a ⌘K away. It is still opt-in, so it is off until you ask for it. shell on its own says which layout you are on. If both are on, the classic terminal layout wins and shell says so: the classic layout is the fallback and nothing is allowed to step in front of it. Switching the Unified Surface on or off reloads the page, in both directions — it swaps the whole layout, and reloading is what keeps your terminal history intact instead of tearing the terminal down mid-sentence. Anything sitting at a y/n prompt is cleared by that reload: nothing is answered for you, so run it again if you still want it. shell legacy on|off does not reload — it only hides chrome inside the layout you are already in. These are per-device settings: they live in this browser or this desktop app and do not follow you to another machine, and neither changes what a command does or how much confirmation an action needs. Same switches as Settings → Appearance → Classic terminal layout and Unified Surface. Unlike skin, which changes colours only, these change which panels exist.

agent

Aliases: none
Purpose: Turn the agent runtime on or off for this device, or see which it is.
Syntax:

>agent runtime on|off
>agent runtime status

Flags: none
Examples:

>agent runtime on
>agent runtime status
>agent runtime off

See also: triage, ask, action permissions

With the agent runtime off — the default, and what every account gets until someone types this — triage returns its per-task receipt and the ask loop stops at the first change it is not allowed to make on its own. With it on, both of them instead show you ONE plan: every step numbered, every argument printed, the task each step touches named by #N, title and the project and list it is in, and what each step costs you. One reply answers the whole plan; there is no partial approval, so y 2 is refused rather than acted on. A step naming a task this workspace cannot resolve — deleted, cleared, or a #N two projects both use — is marked on the plan as one that will be skipped, so you are never asked to approve a line that names something the change will not touch. Answering y runs every step the plan listed, in order — except the ones marked not approvable, which are skipped exactly as the plan said they would be, and named again in the report so you can see which. If the plan contains a step that needs a typed confirmation code, the prompt shows you the code and asks for y <code> instead — a plain y will not run it. When you approve, BEAM tells you what happened: the steps that ran, and if one of them failed, which one, why, and which steps after it did not run. Nothing is rolled back — the steps that already ran stay applied, and the report says so rather than leaving you to guess. A deleted task comes with the restore #N that brings it back. This is a per-device setting — it lives in this browser or this desktop app, does not sync, and does not follow you to another machine. It changes nothing about what a tool costs: the same permission tiers apply, and a destructive step still asks for a typed code.

paste-mode

Aliases: none
Purpose: Set how pasted text is handled.
Syntax:

>paste-mode smart|plain

Flags: none
Examples:

>paste-mode plain

See also: settings

Smart offers to import structured pastes (lists become tasks); plain always pastes as text.

spotlight

Aliases: ?
Purpose: Open the Spotlight overlay.
Syntax:

>? [prefill]
>spotlight

Flags: none
Examples:

>?
>? where did I leave the outline

See also: palette, ask

Spotlight (also Cmd+K) is the fast lookup-and-ask surface. See Concepts: Spotlight vs Terminal for how it differs from the terminal.

palette

Aliases: k
Purpose: Toggle the command palette.
Syntax:

>palette

Flags: none
Examples:

>palette

See also: spotlight, help

calendar

Aliases: cal
Purpose: Open the calendar panel.
Syntax:

>calendar [view]

Flags: none
Examples:

>calendar
>calendar week

See also: today

Day, week, and month views of your tasks by due date.

voice

Aliases: converse
Purpose: Talk with BEAM — start or stop the live voice conversation.
Syntax:

>voice
>voice on|off
>voice engine elevenlabs|gpt|auto

Flags: none
Examples:

>voice
>voice off
>voice engine auto

See also: speak, shutup

One command, one meaning: voice starts the live conversation, and voice again ends it. Cmd+Shift+V and the Converse button do exactly the same thing, because all three drive one session — there is only ever one running on a device. BEAM tells you which state you are in and which voice is answering: Voice ON (ElevenLabs), Voice ON (GPT), or Voice OFF. Running voice off when nothing is live says so (Voice OFF (nothing was running)) rather than claiming it stopped something. It runs on the Speech Engine, for every account — audio goes to ElevenLabs, so it refuses in local mode rather than falling back to the cloud without telling you. Want written replies read aloud instead? That's speak on. Conversations aren't saved: nothing is written down when you hang up.

voice engine picks who answers. The default is the ElevenLabs voice with Claude as the brain. BEAM can also offer a second engine, OpenAI Realtime, when your monthly voice budget is nearly used — on that one GPT answers, not Claude, because it is the model that hears the audio, and BEAM says so out loud and prints it before the first turn. Both engines spend the same monthly budget.

voice engine auto means "tell me when it's worth considering". voice engine elevenlabs means "never mention it". voice engine gpt switches the next session only — after it ends, voice goes back to the ElevenLabs voice, so the choice and the disclosure are always the same moment. The engine has to be switched on for this device first (Settings → Appearance → Voice engine) and on the BEAM server you're using; if either is off, BEAM says so and stays on the ElevenLabs voice.

speak

Aliases: tts
Purpose: Readback — have BEAM read written responses aloud.
Syntax:

>speak
>speak on|off
>speak list
>speak set <name-or-#>
>speak rate <0.5-2>
>speak pitch <0.5-2>
>speak test

Flags: none
Examples:

>speak on
>speak set 2

See also: voice, shutup

speak on has BEAM read responses aloud; speak set picks the reading voice (legacy-engine and browser voices — the Speech Engine's voice is configured on the engine itself). The old voice on / voice set spellings still work and point you here.

shutup

Aliases: shh, quiet, stfu
Purpose: Immediately silence voice output.
Syntax:

>shutup

Flags: none
Examples:

>shutup

See also: voice

privacy

Aliases: none
Purpose: Show encryption status, or lock the workspace.
Syntax:

>privacy
>privacy lock

Flags: none
Examples:

>privacy
>privacy lock

See also: settings, account

privacy shows whether encryption is on, which fields are encrypted, and what stays as plaintext metadata. privacy lock clears the keys from memory and returns to the unlock screen — same as Lock Now in Settings → Encryption.

account

Aliases: none
Purpose: Cloud sync and account management.
Syntax:

>account
>account enable|disable
>account signout
>account export
>account delete

Flags: none
Examples:

>account
>account export

See also: signout, sync

export downloads your data as JSON.

Corrected 2026-09-10 (A3/#1249): delete no longer takes the fixed phrase
account delete confirm. It asks for a code BEAM mints for that one run — reply
y, BEAM shows you the code, you type it back — because a fixed phrase can be
typed ahead of the warning or sent by a script that never read it.

account delete now shows you what the account holds before it asks: how many
tasks, projects and docs go with it. Export first if you want a copy; nothing in
the command does that for you. The local half is read back afterwards; the cloud
half and the account closure are a request this device sends and cannot verify,
and the receipt says that rather than claiming they are done.

signout

Aliases: sign-out, logout, log-out
Purpose: Sign out.
Syntax:

>signout

Flags: none
Examples:

>signout

See also: account

Signing out drops your keys from memory. Your encrypted data stays on the device and in the cloud; sign back in and unlock to continue.

feedback

Aliases: none
Purpose: Send feedback to the team.
Syntax:

>feedback "your thoughts"
>feedback rate <1-5> ["note"]

Flags: none
Examples:

>feedback the council output overflows on narrow windows
>feedback rate 4 "brief is the feature I open first"

See also: help

Goes straight to the team. When something feels wrong, off, or just bad — send it.

help

Aliases: keys, shortcuts, hotkeys
Purpose: In-app manual and command reference.
Syntax:

>help
>help <command>
>help <topic>

Flags: none
Examples:

>help
>help council
>help quickstart

See also: feedback

Bare help shows the command table and keyboard shortcuts. help <command> renders that command's reference entry; help quickstart, help concepts/encryption, and help reference/<family> render the same manual you're reading now, inside the terminal.