Themes and mascot

Jenny’s look (the color theme and the on-screen mascot) is personal to the phone you’re using: none of it is backed up or synced.

Themes

Open the home’s Settings page and the first card, Theme, holds a row of pills: each one is a three-colour swatch (background, surface, accent) with the theme’s short name. Tap a pill to switch instantly; the app doesn’t ask for confirmation and there’s nothing to save. The card shows the full name of the active theme and a one-line description of it.

The Settings page with the theme card, Synthwave '84 selected

There are seven named themes:

Theme	Scheme	Feel
Chanel	Dark	Black and white couture, a thread of gold only where it counts
Synthwave ’84	Dark (default)	Neon pink on near-black
Jenny Kyoto	Dark	Earth, rust, hand-rounded edges
Jenny Sticker	Dark	Cut-out sticker look, white borders, hard shadows
Jenny Fumetto	Light	Ink on paper, comic-panel replies
Jenny Y2K	Light	Glossy gradients, bubblegum gloss
Jenny Pietra	Light	Travertine, bronze, Roman serifs

Synthwave ’84 is what a fresh install starts with. Whichever theme you pick, the app applies it before the very first paint on later launches, so there’s no flash of the wrong colors.

On Android, the status bar and navigation bar follow your theme automatically — their background color and icon color (light or dark) are kept in sync with whichever theme is active, so a light theme like Jenny Pietra gets dark system-bar icons and a dark theme like Synthwave ’84 gets light ones. This only happens inside the Jenny app itself; if you ever open the WebUI in a regular desktop or mobile browser instead of the Android app, the system bars obviously stay whatever your browser or OS already uses.

Your theme choice lives in the WebView’s local storage on this specific device, not in config.json. That has two consequences worth knowing up front:

It does not travel with an encrypted backup — a .jbk file restores your conversations, memory, and settings, but not which theme card you last tapped.
Reinstalling the app, or clearing the app’s storage, resets the theme back to Synthwave ’84. This is expected, not a bug.

Mascot

A small companion (Jenny, styled as “✿”) follows the conversation from the corner of the screen, and she is the door to the chat. On the home’s chat page, and in the workshop’s Console, the chat is already there: a tap on her makes her wave — she winds up, hops raising her arm and waves three times. While she is thinking or talking a raised arm would say something she isn’t doing, so then she only hops. Everywhere else — the home’s other pages (Apps, Notebooks, Settings), the rooms opened from them, a notebook’s board, a mini-app, and every view of the workshop except the Console — she lives docked at the edge: tap her, or swipe her inward from the edge, and the real chat comes up full screen over what you are looking at. The page stays beneath it, blurred behind a veil so that its colours show through while the chat stays readable, but it can’t be touched; tap her again, or press Back, and the chat goes away and the page is where you left it.

A few things about that chat are worth knowing before you rely on it:

It is the same chat as the chat page: history, attachments, the Stop button, everything. Over a notebook’s board, its card drawers and its pages it is that notebook’s conversation (the message box says “…, in the notebook”); everywhere else it is your personal conversation.
Jenny can see the page under the chat. She has a pull-based tool that fetches what is on screen when she decides it’s relevant, and with the chat open over a page it describes that page, not the chat — so “what does this setting do?” asked over the Settings page, or over the workshop’s Brain, is answered about what you are looking at.
If a reply arrives while the chat is closed, a pink dot appears on her head: tap her to read it. It lights for the conversation she would open from where you are.
She can’t be switched off: since she is the way into the chat, a door that disappears would leave the chat unreachable.

While waiting for a reply she switches between a “thinking” pose and, once text starts streaming back, a “talking” pose with an animated mouth. If you leave her alone reading a long reply she quiets back down into “thinking” after about a second of no new text.

Every move of hers squashes and stretches, the way a cartoon character’s body does: at rest she breathes, thinking she sways, talking she stretches a hair on each syllable, and coming out from the edge she leans into the slide. The deformation always stays on the drawing’s own axes, so she never looks sheared, and at the docked edge — where only half of her shows — the talking and the moods leave her body still.

Once a reply is done she reacts to it for 12 seconds: happy, sad or angry. The reaction comes from the emoji she wrote in that reply — her own signature four, 😏 😈 💅 🤭 (the ones her character sheet gives her), or any of the smiles and hearts, make her happy, a 😔 or a 💔 sad, a 😤 or a 😒 angry. When a reply mixes them, the most frequent wins, and on a tie the last one: the tone of a reply is at its end. Emoji inside code or in quoted lines don’t count, and neither do ambiguous ones (🤔, 😅, or her own 🙄 and 😭, which are tone rather than mood) or things that aren’t feelings (☀️, 🍝) — a reply without an emotional emoji shows no face at all. Nothing is asked of the model, so it costs nothing and works with any model and in any language. Errors make her sad on their own. She reacts after speaking, never while, and the face arrives with a body reaction: a hop when happy, a droop when sad, a stamp when angry. agents.defaults.mascotMood in config.json turns it off — see Configuration.

Her face and her body are two separate drawings stacked on each other, which is why an expression can ride on top of any pose rather than being a pose of its own. It works at the docked edge too, where she is seen from the side: the same happy, sad and angry faces are drawn in profile, over her side pose.

Drag her instead of tapping and she takes flight: she hangs from your finger with a bit of pendulum physics, and on release falls, bounces, gets up, and walks back home to her docked position. Hanging she stretches as much as you yank her, in the air she stretches with her speed, the thud squashes her as hard as she landed, and each step dips on the change of foot. It’s a pure fidget interaction with no functional effect — dragging her doesn’t send anything or change any setting.

Her preferences are on the home’s Settings page, in the row named after her (Jenny unless you gave her another name):

Setting	Options	Default
Mascot size	Small / Medium / Large	Small
Floating mascot	on / off (Android only)	Off
Reads the screen	on / off, in Android’s Accessibility settings (Android 14+, with the floating mascot on)	Off

The same screen holds Her name (up to 40 characters). The Settings row, the chat page and the other places that name her follow it, and changing it erases nothing she remembers. Under the mascot settings sits The rules you gave her: a text of yours, up to 2,000 characters, that she reads every turn and never rewrites — Dream included. Both have their own Save button.

Floating mascot puts her in a window above other apps: tap her there to talk, and the answer comes in a bubble, in the same conversation as the app. It reads like the app’s chat: your messages on the right, in the theme’s bubble, and hers on the left — in a bubble of her own here, because beneath them is another app. It needs Android’s “Display over other apps” permission, and the page tells you when that is missing.

Reads the screen lets her see what you were looking at when you tapped her: say “save this” over a recipe page, or “keep this picture”, and she reads the app underneath — once, at the tap — and decides where it goes. She can’t look by herself, and she skips apps that block screenshots. Android lets only you switch an accessibility service on, so the switch takes you to Accessibility; if Android calls it a restricted setting, allow it from Jenny’s app info first.

Size is the side of the square she occupies — 120, 160 or 210 px; she starts small. The rest of her geometry follows from it, so she stays coherent at every size.

Which edge she docks on is not a setting: she always docks on the right, and after a throw she walks back there.

She comes in one look, in color. There used to be a black-and-white switch here, drawn from a second set of line-art artwork; it was retired when her expressions were drawn, because keeping both meant drawing every expression twice.

Like the theme, Mascot size is stored in this device’s local storage, not in config.json and not in your encrypted backup. A reinstall brings her back small. Floating mascot is the exception: it lives in config.json (floating.enabled), because the window is started by the app’s background service, which can’t read the WebView’s storage.

If your phone has “reduce motion” turned on at the OS level, Jenny respects it: the animated mouth-flap while she talks is skipped in favor of a static pose, and her gestures stand still: no hops, sways or squashes, and the wave shows as a raised arm for the length of a wave. The drag-to-fly gesture itself is a direct manipulation you control with your finger, so it still works if you choose to use it, without the squash and stretch.

UI language

The interface exists in two languages: Italian and English. It follows the phone’s system language, checking an exact match first and then just the language prefix; for any other language it falls back to English. There is no language switch inside the app: to change it, change the phone’s language.

This is worth separating clearly from a similarly named setting:

UI language only controls what the buttons, labels, and toasts in the WebUI say.
agents.defaults.language is a config.json field, and the only place that writes it is the onboarding wizard. It captures the UI language active when you set the phone up, and uses it for the text the backend writes to you: the initial welcome message, provider errors, notification titles and slash-command replies.

Changing the phone’s language later does not touch agents.defaults.language. Any backend-generated text that depends on that field keeps using the language you had during onboarding until you edit config.json directly; see Configuration. Several backend error messages (settings validation, some model-list failures) are in English regardless of either.

None of this affects what language Jenny actually replies to you in during a normal conversation: that depends on the language model you’re using and how you write to it, not on any setting in this app.

Themes and mascot

Themes

Mascot

UI language

See also