The Pia Window

Once you’re set up, here’s how to get around the Pia window.

The sidebar on the left switches between Pia’s screens. It starts as a slim strip of icons; click the menu (hamburger) button at the top to expand it and show labels.

What appears depends on the window’s mode:

Assistant windows

Assistant — chat with the AI
Chat history — browse and reopen past chats
Memory — your personal knowledge vault
Reminders — reminders you’ve set, grouped by when they’re due
Routines — goals Pia carries out on a schedule
Assignments — background assignments your Pia server is running for you. Only present when a server offers them
Todo — your Kanban board
Settings

Optimize windows

Optimize — transform selected text
History — past optimizations
Todo
Settings

Which screens let you create things

The sidebar screens are not all the same kind of thing. Some are full editors, some show you what your conversations produced and let you manage it, and one is purely a browser:

Screen	Can you create something there?
Todo	Yes. Type a title in the box at the top of the board or the side panel and press Enter, or dictate it with the microphone button. You can also add columns.
Reminders	No new-reminder button. Reminders are made by asking Pia in a chat — “remind me to call the dentist tomorrow”. The screen is where you snooze, dismiss, disable, delete and filter them.
Memory	No new-memory button. Pia writes memory as you talk. You can read, edit and delete any entry from the screen, and drop documents onto it.
Chat history	No. It’s a browser for past chats, with search and filters. New chats start in the Assistant.
Routines	Yes. New routine opens the editor, and you can start from a blueprint or let Pia draft one from a sentence.
Assignments	No. Assignments are started from the Assistant’s composer. The screen tracks them.

So none of these are read-only: with the exception of Chat history, each one lets you change and remove what’s there. What varies is whether creating happens on the screen or in conversation.

Keyboard shortcuts jump straight to a screen:

Assistant windows — Ctrl+1 Assistant · Ctrl+2 Memory · Ctrl+3 Reminders · Ctrl+4 Settings
Optimize windows — Ctrl+1 Optimize · Ctrl+2 History · Ctrl+3 Settings

(Chat history and Todo don’t have a number shortcut.)

At the bottom of the sidebar:

New Window — open another Pia window in Optimize or Assistant mode.
Theme toggle — switch between light, dark, and system themes.

The theme control shows the theme you’re on

The word at the bottom of the sidebar — Light, Dark, or System — is the theme that is currently active, not the one clicking will give you. It’s a label and a button at the same time.

Clicking it cycles through the three in order: System → Dark → Light → System. So yes, there is a system-follow option: keep clicking until it reads System, and Pia will follow whatever Windows is set to, switching with it if you have Windows on a light/dark schedule.

What a second window gives you

New Window opens another Pia window, and you choose whether it opens in Assistant or Optimize mode. The useful part is running the two side by side — an Optimize window for rewriting text while an Assistant window holds a conversation — rather than switching one window back and forth.

Two windows of the same mode is also fine, and each keeps its own current screen and its own active chat, so you can watch a long-running chat in one while working in another.

What a second window does not give you is a second set of settings. Windows share one application:

The persona is shared. Which persona is active is stored per mode (one for Assistant, one for Optimize), not per window — so two Assistant windows always use the same persona, and changing it in one changes it in the other. There is no way to have two personas answering at the same time.
Providers, tool permissions, theme, hotkeys and your memory vault are all likewise application-wide.

If what you want is two different personas, switch the picker between messages — replies are attributed to the persona that wrote them, so one conversation can hold both.

The bell on the right edge

The bell with a number on it, on the right edge of the window, is the handle for the Flow panel. The number is how many items are currently waiting for your attention — a reminder that fired, a todo that’s due, a background chat that finished or needs a confirmation, a routine’s result.

Click the bell to slide Flow open. Click outside it, or the chevron in its header, to close it again. There is also a Pin button in the Flow header that keeps it docked open, in which case the main content makes room for it instead of being covered.

The bell is present on every screen and in every window, so it’s the one place to look when you think Pia wanted something from you. See Flow for what the cards do.

The encryption bar across the top

If a coloured bar appears across the top of the window reading “End-to-end encryption setup required to sync your data.” with a Set up now button, this device is signed in to an account that uses end-to-end encryption but doesn’t hold the key yet.

It blocks syncing, and nothing else. Pia works normally while it’s up — chats, todos, memory and every other feature keep running locally; they just don’t travel to or from your other devices.

The bar has no dismiss button, and that’s deliberate: it isn’t a tip you’ve read, it’s a report that your data isn’t syncing. It disappears by itself the moment setup succeeds. You can leave it and set things up later — click Set up now whenever you’re ready, and see Cloud Sync for the two ways through it.

Pia lives in the system tray

Closing a Pia window with the X does not quit Pia — it hides the window and leaves Pia running in the system tray (the icons by the clock, sometimes behind the ^ arrow). This is deliberate: hotkeys, reminders and routines only work while Pia is running.

Minimizing is different from closing. The minimize button sends Pia to the taskbar, like any other application, and the taskbar button brings it back. It is the X that puts Pia away into the tray.

So if Pia seems to have vanished, it hasn’t:

Press its hotkey — Ctrl+Alt+P for an Assistant window, Ctrl+Alt+O for Optimize. These work from any application. You can change them under Settings → General → Hotkeys.
Double-click the tray icon to show or hide your default window.
Right-click the tray icon for a menu that opens or closes an Optimize window, opens or closes an Assistant window, and — the only way to actually stop Pia — Exit.

By default Pia starts with Windows and shows a window; Settings → General → Application has Launch at Windows startup (on) and Start minimized to system tray (off) if you’d rather it started out of the way. See General Settings.

The Flow rail

On the right edge is the Flow rail — Pia’s attention panel for reminders, deadlines, finished background chats, and notifications. Click the handle on the right edge to open it.