focus setting in your .coderabbit.yaml file is a single control with three preset levels. Pick one, and CodeRabbit tunes its review output so feedback stays centered on what matters most to your team, with no need to toggle individual settings one at a time.
focus accepts one of three values:
| Value | Behavior |
|---|---|
casual | All default output. Reproduces today’s review output exactly. This is the default. |
balanced | Removes decorative elements (poem, in-progress fortune, chat art) and lowers emoji usage. |
high | Pares reviews down to essential content only. Trims additional walkthrough and metadata sections on top of the balanced changes, and hides several review sections entirely. |
focus is behaviorally inert by default. Leaving it unset (or set to casual) produces the exact same review output as before this setting existed. You opt in to leaner reviews by setting balanced or high.What focus controls
Each focus level turns the settings below on or off. Higher levels are cumulative: high applies everything balanced does, plus more. The last group of rows (comment type label through the tips and commands footer) are review sections trimmed only at high; they have no individual configuration flag.
| Setting | casual | balanced | high |
|---|---|---|---|
reviews.poem | on | off | off |
reviews.in_progress_fortune | on | off | off |
chat.art | on | off | off |
reviews.commit_status | on | on | off |
reviews.estimate_code_review_effort | on | on | off |
reviews.suggested_labels | on | on | off |
reviews.suggested_reviewers | on | on | off |
reviews.high_level_summary_in_walkthrough | off | off | on (folds the summary into the walkthrough) |
| Emoji | shown as today | lowered | lowered |
| Comment type label (Potential issue / Refactor suggestion / Nitpick; severity and effort/reward badges are kept) | on | on | off |
| Review info (run configuration, reviewed commits, files selected for processing) | on | on | off |
| Pre-merge checks results | on | on | off |
Tips and commands footer (@coderabbitai commands and usage tips) | on | on | off |
Explicitly-set values always win over the preset. If you set one of the controlled settings directly in your
.coderabbit.yaml (for example reviews.poem: true), that value is respected even when focus would otherwise turn it off.Setting focus from the web UI
focus is also available in the organization and repository settings UI. When you pick balanced or high there, the UI immediately applies the preset to the individual toggles in the form and shows a notice listing what changed. The toggles stay editable, so you can flip any of them back (for example, re-enable the poem) and your choice is saved.
Emoji handling
Atbalanced and high, CodeRabbit lowers emoji usage but doesn’t remove emoji entirely. It does this two ways: the review and chat prompts ask the model to avoid emoji, and decorative emoji baked into review output (summaries, walkthroughs, per-comment headers, pre-merge headers) are stripped at render time.
Two things to keep in mind:
- Some emoji may still appear. The model is asked to avoid them, but there’s no hard guarantee in its responses.
- Load-bearing emoji are kept on purpose. Emoji that carry meaning (severity and effort indicators, the
🎯/⏱️markers, and pass/fail markers like✅/❌in pre-merge checks) are status, not decoration, so they remain.
Examples
Reduce decorative output while keeping review metadata:high but keep the poem anyway (explicit value overrides the preset):
What’s next
Configuration reference
See the full schema for
focus and all general settingsAutomatic review controls
Fine-tune when and how CodeRabbit reviews your pull requests
YAML configuration
Learn how the .coderabbit.yaml file is structured and applied