Settings

Settings and customisation

Settings come from three places, and the later ones win:

1. built-in defaults
2. config.toml
3. command-line flags

A setting you get wrong is reported, not swallowed. An unknown key, an unreadable file, a value that is not one of the accepted ones, or a flag this product does not accept -- each produces a notice you can see. That is true of the config file and of the command line, which it once was not: one end told you and the other end quietly discarded it, and nobody had chosen that.

The config file

Windows	%APPDATA%\bachelorpad\config.toml
Linux	$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/bachelorpad/config.toml, else ~/.config/bachelorpad/config.toml

Help > Diagnostics prints the path as resolved on your machine, which beats this table. Tools > Configuration shows what was actually loaded.

# Every key, with its default.

# Light, Dark, Organic, Green -- or omitted, to follow the desktop.
# theme = "Dark"

# "software" or "platform". Software is the default and is the one that
# behaves the same everywhere.
renderer = "software"

# A tracing filter. Quiet by default: an editor that chatters on stdout is
# an editor whose real warnings get ignored.
log = "warn"

# Editor font size, in points. Ctrl+= and Ctrl+- change this for the session.
font_size = 14

# Columns a Tab advances to.
tab_width = 4

# Insert spaces for Tab rather than a tab character.
indent_spaces = false

Settings roam with your Windows profile. Data and caches do not -- an index has no business crossing a network at sign-out.

Flags

Anything in the config file can be overridden for one run:

bpad --theme Dark --font-size 16 notes.md
bpad --editor-view
bpad --line 427 server.log

A value can follow its flag after a space or after =: --line 427 and --line=427 are the same. Until 1.0 only the second worked, and the first opened a file called 427. Everything after -- is a file name, however it begins, which is how to open a file called -notes.txt:

bpad -- -notes.txt

tab_width and indent_spaces decide what Tab inserts from the first document onwards. Before 1.0 they were read and then ignored, and every run began with tabs four columns wide.

The full list is in the CLI reference, which is generated from --help -- so it is the binary's own answer rather than a copy of it.

--help and --version are handled before configuration is loaded, on purpose: --help is what you reach for when the product is misbehaving, and a config file broken badly enough to be the reason is not a reason to withhold it.

On Windows, a release build has no console of its own. --help and --version print to stdout, which reaches a terminal when you run it from one, and goes nowhere when you double-click the executable. That is a deliberate concession -- the fix costs unsafe and a Windows dependency, to serve somebody double-clicking a text editor in order to read its help.

Themes

View > Theme: Light, Dark, Organic, Green, and System.

System follows the desktop's own light/dark preference and changes with it.

What is not configurable

Keyboard shortcuts are fixed. Rebinding is a real feature with a real design behind it -- a keymap file, a conflict story, a way to see what a key does now -- and none of that has been designed, so it is absent rather than half-present.

The window does not remember its size or position, and open tabs are not restored on the next launch.

---

This page is generated from docs/user/08-settings.md and edits made here will be overwritten. Change the source and open a pull request.