Chapter 13 — Settings, Themes, Preferences

The Settings dialog is the single place where you configure how AidaIDE looks and behaves. Open with File → Settings (Ctrl+,) or the gear icon at the far right of the toolbar.

Layout

The Settings panel is a Toplevel window with seven categories down the left and the active category's controls on the right. Each category has its own "Reset to Defaults" link in the lower-right.

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ ┌──────────────┐ │ Active panel                             │
│ │ General      │ │   ─ control                              │
│ │ Appearance ★ │ │   ─ control                              │
│ │ Editor       │ │   ─ control                              │
│ │ SSH          │ │                                          │
│ │ Security     │ │                                          │
│ │ Network      │ │                                          │
│ │ Plugins      │ │                                          │
│ └──────────────┘ │                                          │
│                  │  Reset this section to defaults          │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Changes save automatically when you click off a field. Closing the dialog never asks "save changes?" because everything is already saved.

General

• Startup behaviour — open with last workspace / open empty / show launcher.
• Confirm on exit — toggle.
• Telemetry — opt-in anonymous usage data. Off by default.
• Locale — language and date format (en-US is the only fully translated locale at present).
• Working directory — where AidaIDE's data dir lives (vault, logs, workspaces). Move with care; restart required.

Appearance

The heaviest section.

Themes and appearance

• Theme — drop-down of available colour themes. The brand defaults are AidaIDE Dark (navy + cyan) and AidaIDE Light. Add-on themes ship via plugins or live in ~/.aidaide/themes/.
• Accent colour — overrides cyan with another. Useful for branding a deployment.
• Font size (UI) — base size in points.
• Window opacity — 100% on by default; reduce for see-through windows on supported platforms.

Layout

• Layout mode — Classic Tabs (default) or Grid. See Chapter 16 for what each does.
• Side panel positions — left / right / hidden for each panel (Files, AI, LCOT).
• Status bar — visible / hidden.
• Tab bar style — Top / Side.

Animations

• Toggle splash, toolbar hover effects, sidebar slide animations. All cosmetic; off if you find them distracting.

Editor

Font and spacing

• Editor font family — Consolas, JetBrains Mono, Fira Code, etc. (whatever is installed on your system).
• Editor font size.
• Line spacing.
• Tab size — width of \t and indent. Default 4.
• Insert spaces — convert Tab key to spaces. Default on.

Behaviour

• Auto-save — off / on save loss / every N seconds.
• Format on save — runs the language formatter when you save.
• Highlight current line, Show line numbers, Show whitespace, Wrap long lines — all toggles.
• Default encoding — UTF-8 (do not change unless you know exactly why).
• Default line endings — LF / CRLF / platform.

Syntax

• Add custom highlight rules per file extension.
• Toggle inline lint warnings (Python / JS).

LCOT

• Hidden commands — list of built-in LCOT command IDs to suppress in the tree.
• Custom command file — path to your lcot_user_commands.json. Defaults to ~/.aidaide/lcot_user_commands.json.

SSH

• Default port — 22.
• Connection timeout — seconds.
• Keepalive interval — seconds. 0 disables.
• Default key path — pre-fills the Add Host dialog.
• Auto-accept new host keys — off by default and recommended off. On is convenient but kills the host-key-change warning that catches MITM.
• Known hosts file — defaults to ~/.aidaide/known_hosts. Separate from ~/.ssh/known_hosts to keep AidaIDE's history isolated.
• Terminal type — xterm-256color by default.

Security

• Vault timeout — re-lock the vault after N minutes of inactivity. 0 disables.
• Require password on resume — pop the unlock dialog when the OS resumes from sleep.
• Encryption profile — Standard (AES-GCM via Fernet) or Strong (Scrypt + AES-GCM with longer derivation). Strong is slower on first unlock.
• Audit log path — ~/.aidaide/audit.log by default.
• SAST scanner paths — per-language binary locations (bandit, gosec, eslint, etc.).
• CVE feed refresh — interval (daily by default).

Network

• DNS resolver — system / Cloudflare / Google / custom.
• HTTP proxy — for outbound requests (CVE feed updates, plugin marketplace).
• Capture buffer — max packets retained by Packet Capture.
• Notifications — SMTP server for email alerts, Slack webhook URL, generic webhook URL.
• Polling — Fleet Manager / Monitoring Dashboard refresh interval.

Plugins

• Marketplace URL — defaults to AidaIDE's hosted store.
• Enabled plugins — toggle each on/off. Disabled plugins remain installed but inert until re-enabled (restart required).
• Trusted authors — list of publishers whose plugins do not require per-install confirmation.
• Plugin install location — defaults to ~/.aidaide/plugins/.
• Widget Permissions — per-widget allow/deny for shell, network, file system. See Chapter 15.

Experimental Features

A separate File → Experimental Features… dialog hosts beta toggles. Things flagged here are off by default and may change or disappear. Today's list includes early-access bits of the Hierarchy Builder (multi-port agents), expanded AI workflow primitives, and beta DB engines (SQLite, Cassandra).

Debug Console (Ctrl+Shift+D)

Not in Settings but conceptually adjacent — open from Preview → Debug → Debug Console.

A live log of internal AidaIDE events: API calls, SSH commands, plugin loads, errors. Useful when filing a bug. Right-click → Copy All to grab the buffer for attaching to a bug report.

Performance Monitor

Preview → Debug → Performance Monitor.

Real-time charts of CPU / memory / threads / file handles inside the AidaIDE process. Useful when something feels slow. The recent fix to the truncation issue is in main now; if you see numbers cut off again, file a bug.

Keyboard Shortcuts editor

Reachable from File → Keyboard Shortcuts… (Ctrl+K, Ctrl+S) and detailed in Chapter 14.

Display settings

For multi-monitor setups: File → Settings → Appearance → Display Settings… opens a sub-panel for:

• DPI scaling per monitor.
• Default monitor for new windows.
• Per-monitor theme overrides (rare; useful for a dim secondary monitor).

Terms & Setup

Theme vs accent

A theme is the full palette (background, foreground, sidebar, accents). The accent is the single highlight colour overlaid on whatever theme is active. Override the accent without changing the theme.

"I changed something and it broke"

Every section has Reset this section to defaults at the bottom. If the IDE will not start because of a setting, the file lives at ~/.aidaide/settings.json — delete it (lose all settings) or open in a plain editor and hand-fix.

Where settings persist

• ~/.aidaide/settings.json — all settings above.
• ~/.aidaide/themes/ — custom theme files.
• ~/.aidaide/known_hosts — accepted SSH host keys.
• ~/.aidaide/audit.log — audit log.
• ~/.aidaide/logs/ — diagnostic logs (used by bug reports).

"Settings dialog will not open"

Run from a terminal so you can see the traceback. Usually the cause is a corrupt theme file in ~/.aidaide/themes/. Move it out and retry.

"I want a smaller font everywhere"

• Appearance → Font size (UI) lowers menu, tabs, panels.
• Editor → Editor font size lowers code font.
• Both are independent.

Multi-monitor + DPI

• Each monitor's DPI is detected on startup. If you plug in a monitor after launching, restart AidaIDE so it picks up the new geometry.
• Mixed-DPI setups sometimes draw fuzzy text on the lower-DPI monitor. The display panel has a "Force per-monitor DPI" toggle that re-renders cleanly at the cost of slightly slower window moves.

Cloud Portal

Cloud Portal access (browser remote access via https://aidaide.app) is enabled in Settings → Cloud Portal. Toggle Enable Cloud Access on; AidaIDE generates a per-device certificate and starts an outbound WebSocket tunnel. No router port forwarding is required.

Full walkthrough — including guest passes, permission groups, and the in-browser Remote Desktop — lives in Ch. 21 — Cloud Portal and Web Access.