You are reading the built-in manual

These are the pages AURA carries within itself: inside the application, the ? key opens the one for the screen you are on. They are published here exactly as they are, so they can be read without installing anything.

Actions Claude Code triggers automatically at a precise moment in a session's lifecycle. A command hook is shell: it runs on your machine, with your rights, and receives the event as JSON on its standard input.

The screen edits the hooks key of settings.json, and shows separately — read-only — the hooks your plugins bring.

The anatomy of a hook

Three nested levels, which have to be told apart to read the screen:

1. The event — when it fires. One section per event.
2. The group — a matcher and the actions that go with it. An event can carry several.
3. The action — what is run. A group can chain several.

The matcher filters. Left empty, a tool hook fires on every tool. Edit|Write restricts it to file writes alone.

The action types

Type	What it runs	Field editable here
command	A shell command, receiving the JSON event on stdin	The command
prompt	An evaluation by a model	The prompt
agent	A sub-agent	The prompt
http	An outgoing request	The URL
mcp_tool	A tool from an MCP server	—

Every action also carries an optional timeout, in seconds.

A type whose main field I do not expose (mcp_tool) says so and points to the JSON tab in Settings. More broadly: advanced fields the form does not show — env, args, if… — are preserved as they are on save. Editing a hook here never strips it of what the screen cannot display.

The event catalogue

Thirty-three events are offered. The add selector, at the bottom of the page, shows the description of the one selected; every section title carries the same tooltip.

Session lifecycle — SessionStart, SessionEnd, Setup (launch in init/maintenance mode).

Around your messages — UserPromptSubmit (before your prompt is processed), UserPromptExpansion (when a typed command expands into a prompt).

Around tools — PreToolUse, PostToolUse (after a success), PostToolUseFailure (after a failure), PostToolBatch (after a batch of parallel calls resolves, before the next model call).

Permissions — PermissionRequest (a dialog is shown), PermissionDenied (denied by the auto-mode classifier).

Sub-agents and tasks — SubagentStart, SubagentStop, TaskCreated, TaskCompleted, TeammateIdle.

End of turn — Stop (Claude has finished answering), StopFailure (the turn ended on an API error).

Context — PreCompact, PostCompact, InstructionsLoaded (a CLAUDE.md or a .claude/rules/*.md is loaded).

Model — PreModelSwitch (before a model change: the hook can allow it, deny it or have it confirmed), PostModelSwitch (after).

Environment — ConfigChange, CwdChanged, DirectoryAdded (a directory joins the workspace, through /add-dir), FileChanged, WorktreeCreate, WorktreeRemove.

MCP — Elicitation (a server asks for input during a tool call), ElicitationResult (after your answer, before it goes back to the server).

Display — Notification, MessageDisplay.

Plugin hooks

A plugin can provide its own hooks. They live in the plugin's hooks/hooks.json, not in your settings.json — without this section, the screen would look empty while hooks were very much running.

So I show them apart: the plugin name, its state (on / off according to enabledPlugins), the events it covers, and the deduplicated list of the commands it runs. They are not editable here: managing them is the plugin's business.

Turning everything off

The switch at the top stops every hook from running without destroying their configuration. It is the first reflex when a session behaves oddly. Managed hooks escape that cut.

Two implementation details that show up in the diff:

• the underlying key, disableAllHooks, is inverted with respect to the screen's Enabled / Disabled labels — the switch spares you that mental translation;
• the “enabled” state is written by the absence of the key, not by false. The file records only departures.

Adding, removing

Add a hook on <event> creates an empty group with a command action. Group and Action add more inside an existing section.

Removing the last group of an event also removes the event key, and if it was the last event, the hooks key disappears entirely. No empty object is left behind.

Saving

Nothing is written as you type. The unsaved pill marks the gap, Preview… shows the settings.json diff, and the write happens only on confirmation. The button stays inactive as long as the underlying JSON is invalid.