Scopes

Claude Code reads settings from JSON files at four scopes. The scopes are laid out in precedence order, highest first — the highest-precedence file that defines a key wins.

ClaudeScope omits Managed (#1) entirely — it's an enterprise concern that lives outside the personal-tool workflow this project targets.

~/.claude/settings.local.json was originally excluded too, but Claude Code is observed to create and use it when the user's home directory is itself inside a git repo. ClaudeScope treats it as a first-class scope on par with the other three.

Column layout

The four scopes render as columns, broadest-on-the-left to narrowest-on-the-right:

┌─────────┬─────────────┬──────────┬───────┐
│  User   │ User-Local  │ Project  │ Local │
└─────────┴─────────────┴──────────┴───────┘
   ←──── broader / shared      narrower ───→

That's the opposite of precedence order. ClaudeScope's column order is about audience — User-scope rules affect every project, Local-scope rules affect one. The Effective settings panel is the trailing column in the same row, summarizing what applies in the active directory. Default-collapsed with inline counts; expand to see the full union across scopes. It's not a full precedence-aware evaluation of what Claude Code resolves at runtime — the subtitle in the app says so.

Per-scope file presence

A scope's column shows as absent when its file doesn't exist on disk. ClaudeScope never auto-creates a scope file just to fill the column; it creates the file on first write to that scope, and only then. A move into an empty scope produces a fresh settings.json (or settings.local.json) with just the moved rule.

The User and User-Local scopes resolve relative to the OS home directory (%USERPROFILE% on Windows, $HOME elsewhere); Project and Local resolve from the currently-loaded project root. See Architecture → Overview for how scope discovery walks up from the project picker's selection.

Switching projects

Two ways to switch the loaded project:

• Open project… — file picker; default to ~ on first open.
• Recent projects dropdown — click the project label in the topbar for a menu of recently-opened roots (capped at 10, persists across sessions). See Moving rules for the move flows that this enables across projects.