Climate control "auto" behavior (touring)

[sterminare]

Hi all,
I have a '24 hatch sport touring. It's my first car with automatic climate control and I've been enjoying using it.. but I'm a little confused on how it behaves and am wondering if any of you know.
I usually prefer to have my car set to recirculate when driving on the highway, so I don't get hit by exhaust periodically. But it seems that if you enable recirculate while the climate is on auto, it disables the auto. So it seems that you can't have it on auto and recirculate.
But the other day, I'm pretty sure I noticed that it was on auto and recirculate, I don't remember if I actually turned on recirculate or not. Does it ever automatically enable recirculate? If so, what triggers that? Is it a hot/cold thing or what? We've had our first few warm days recently, so I've had the temp on cold for the first time.
Similarly, changing the vent setting disables the auto climate control, but I've noticed that when set to auto it seems not to blow much out of the passenger vents, I feel it mostly on my feet and presumably the defroster? Does it change this based on temperature (i.e. if it's expecting fog on the windshield)? I usually prefer to have it on feet&passenger vents.
Does auto setting ever turn on/off the A/C compressor? I noticed that the car doesn't tell me whether the A/C compressor is active unless I press the A/C button, at which point it then says "A/C ON" or "A/C OFF". But setting it to auto then turns off this indicator so I'm not sure what it's doing when I change the temperature setting.

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[RobbJK]

The auto setting does everything. It will enable the recirculate once the interior air temp is optimal to do so. Same for the AC compressor - it will auto that on/off as needed (usually it's on in my 10th gen). Any manual adjustment of settings will disable the auto setting. Basically all you can do (and keep the auto setting on) is adjust the temp you want - the system does the rest of the work switching between optimal settings for that temperature.

Edit: Also yes, the auto setting favors the foot vents over the dash vents except when it activates the defrost vents.