Modes — switch the whole vibe at once¶
A mode is a one-word macro that reconfigures everything together — hold music, audio FX, persona, dials, the displays, the TTS voice and the mouse haptics — and clears whatever the previous mode left behind. They're mutually exclusive, so you never end up with (say) a rave and a call-centre running at once.
nhj mode rave # or just ask Claude: "switch to rave mode"
nhj mode normal # reset everything to the sensible baseline
nhj mode # show current mode + list them all
| Mode | What it does |
|---|---|
| normal | The reset baseline — continuous hold music, characters' own voices, default dials. |
| rave | Full-volume party muzak (ducks only under alerts) + a cycling party animation on the displays. |
| call-centre | Phone-line-compressed voice and tinny hold music, a bored/apathetic government-operator persona, plus a looping room-tone bed. "Your call is important to us…" |
| quiet / focus | No music, displays off — haptic-only. Heads-down work with zero audio/visual noise. |
| special-forces | Whispered comms voice (swaps the reference voice sample for all characters), simple single-tap haptics, displays dark, and a looping radio bed. Silent and terse. |
| went-full-bogan | Maximum unbleeped swearing + razor-sharp competence — no patience for stupid questions, but warm and playful. (Mind the screen-share.) |
Modes are config-driven — each is a preset in ../config/default.yaml under modes:, so you can retune the bundled ones or add your own (a mode can set muzak, audio_mode, ambient, scenario, display, voice, haptic, censor and per-character dials). The old granular toggles (nhj muzak rave, nhj callcentre on) are now aliases that apply the matching mode; nhj set / nhj muzak still fine-tune within a mode.
⚠️ A word on the workplace¶
Swearing is off by default — out of the box Jan keeps it clean, and even at full tilt the strong words are bleeped to a spoken "quack". But NHJ can absolutely be NSFW if you want it to be: flip on
went-full-boganmode (ornhj censor off) and you get the full, unfiltered Aussie bogan experience. That's brilliant solo; it is not what you want narrating your screen-share in an open-plan office. Consider yourself warned. 🤙Everything is yours to dial. Every sound and visual is customisable — pick exactly how much (or how little) you want to be bothered. Silence the four hours of custom muzak with
nhj muzak off, drop to haptic-onlyquietmode, or slip intospecial-forcesmode — a whispered voice and a single discreet buzz — for those midnight inference sessions behind enemy lines.
The audio side of modes (the phone bandpass, room beds, ducking) is detailed in Audio Standard & Pipeline.