Longhand ships with sensible defaults. You can tune hook behavior, relevance thresholds, and injection size for your workflow.

longhand config

Everything lives under one data directory — SQLite (longhand.db), the ChromaDB vector store (chroma/), config.json, and logs/.

Resolution order (one rule everywhere, new in v0.13.0): an explicit --data-dir flag > the LONGHAND_DATA_DIR environment variable > ~/.longhand. Because child processes inherit the environment variable, setting it relocates the store for the CLI, the hooks, spawned background workers, and the MCP server in one move — and the optional launchd reconciler bakes the resolved path into its plist. longhand doctor prints the resolved directory and which source won.

• LONGHAND_DATA_DIR — relocate the data directory (see above).
• LONGHAND_NO_UPDATE_CHECK=1 — disable the once-daily version check against pypi.org entirely (it already never runs from hooks or the MCP server).