The Settings system

What it is

The Settings system is the surface behind the gear icon. Four things make it a system rather than a long list of toggles:

• Rooms. Settings are grouped into clearly named areas instead of one flat scroll, and moving through them is a two-level drill-down: pick a room, then the page inside it, with a breadcrumb back to the top. This grouping is the default for everyone.
• Search over the whole surface. A search box sits at the top of the Settings sidebar on every page. It searches setting names, the room a setting lives in, and each setting's keywords and description, and choosing a result jumps straight to that control. It tolerates a near miss in a name, so a small typo does not sink the setting you meant.
• Hub pages. The largest areas are consolidated into one page with a tab strip — Keyboard Shortcuts, Email, Inbox, Automations, Notifications and Diagnostics among them — instead of a row of separate, half-empty sections.
• A setup section. The setup section re-runs the initial setup wizard, relaunches the guided app tours, and runs the interactive demo, so a tour can be taken again at any time rather than only on first run.

Two further properties come with it: the same surface is driven from the command line for agents (below), and the documentation for almost every setting is built in — each setting's own small "?" opens its help in place, with no internet needed.

Where to find it

• The gear icon at the right of the window's top bar is the desktop entry point.
• The Settings entry in the Omniscio group at the bottom of the sidebar opens the same screen as a virtual project — the same UI, just a different way in.
• On a phone or a narrow window, Settings is a row in the header menu reached from the bottom bar.

Both desktop entry points render the same Settings screen, so a change made through one is immediately visible in the other.

How it behaves

• No save button. Changes are applied as you make them. A few settings — error reporting and GPU acceleration among them — need a restart, and Settings says so where that is the case.
• Search results are ranked. A match on a room's name comes first, then a setting whose own name matches, then a setting matched only through its keywords or description.
• Deep links land where they say. A link to a setting — from a search hit, a tip, or elsewhere in the app — opens Settings straight at that control rather than at the landing page.
• An agent can change settings through the command line. Reading settings is open; changing one goes through the approval gate, so a change an agent proposes arrives as an approval request you accept or refuse rather than as a silent edit. Bulk settings restores from a backup file are gated the same way.
• Secrets stay out of reads. The command-line reads deliberately strip secret-bearing keys, so an agent can inspect how the app is configured without being handed credentials.

Related

• Open settings — every way into Settings, every way out, and how to land on one section directly.
• Settings Home — the landing page with the search hero, popular tiles and the changed-from-default list.
• Multi-level Settings navigation — the room picker and the drill-down this surface opens with.
• New Settings layout — what the rooms are and what changed when they landed.
• Settings reference — the one-page alphabetical list of every setting.
• In-app settings help — the per-setting "?" documentation this screen serves in place.
• Approving a settings change from an agent — the approval path a command-line settings change takes.