Configuration

Editora keeps preferences and session state in a config folder. Most settings have a UI in the Settings window; everything underneath is plain text you can edit by hand.

The Settings window

Open it with View: Settings (view.settings, Ctrl+, in the CUA, Sublime and VS Code keymaps). The sidebar groups the pages; a page whose feature is still in beta (AI, AI Agent, AI Actions, LSP, Debugging, Remote, Sync, MCP Server) carries a Beta pill in the sidebar and beside its title. Every page title has a ? link that opens that page’s documentation for the version of Editora you are running. The window fits its 900 px minimum width in every language.

• Changes apply as you make them. There is no OK or Save button, and the footer says so. Every setting is also a palette command.
• The window opens centred on the editor window the first time. After that it stays where you put it for the rest of the session.
• A text field applies when you press Enter, when you leave it, and when you close the window.
• A number field takes a whole number in its range. A number out of range, or any other text, stays in the field, marked red, with a tooltip that gives the range; the setting keeps its value until you fix the text or use the arrows.
• Other input that cannot be used, such as a ruler list, a TODO pattern, a Remote host or port, a plugin registry URL or a sync branch, also turns its field red with the reason and keeps what you typed.
• Rows that only matter while a switch is on are greyed out while it is off, with the note “Turn on “…” to change these settings.” This holds on every page. A switch that is off is drawn so that it shows in every theme, and a disabled one is grey.
• The list editors (Snippets, Templates, Abbreviations, External Tools and Remote sites) save each change as you make it too; only Macros keeps Save and Revert. Deleting an entry from a list asks “Delete “…”?” first, with Cancel as the default button.
• The Editor page is grouped into Display, Editing, Clipboard, Indentation and Saving, followed by Performance, Logs, CSV, File previews and Export & Print. Updates and Trusted folders are on the Advanced page.
• A few settings apply only when Editora starts: the Language on the Appearance page, merging the menu bar into the title bar, and turning plugins on or off. Once you change one, its row says it applies after a restart, and the footer says “Restart Editora to apply N changes.” with a Restart Now button. Restart Now, or Application: Restart (app.restart) in the palette, quits the usual way, asking about unsaved files, and starts Editora again; cancelling the quit cancels the restart.

Settings you changed

A row whose value differs from the default has a marker at its leading edge, and a screen reader reads it as “Modified”. The sidebar shows beside each page how many of its settings differ from the default.

A modified row has a Reset to default link under its text, and the same item on its right-click menu. It puts that row’s settings back to their defaults and leaves every other row alone. API keys and the Local History limits are never marked or reset row by row.

The Modified toggle beside the search box lists only the settings that differ from their defaults; typing @modified in the search does the same. A row you put back to its default leaves the list.

In a project window, the User | Project switch at the top of the window chooses whose settings the pages edit; see Inside a project.

Search

The search box at the top of the sidebar finds a setting by its title, its description, its card and page names, the choices of a list, and extra keywords. Every word you type must appear, in any order. Pages without a match are greyed out in the sidebar, and rows whose title or description matches are tinted.

The page with the best match opens. A match in a row’s title counts more than one in its description or keywords, and a whole word more than part of one; words that name a page (keymaps, build tools) open that page. Some settings are found by other names too: zoom finds Font size, line endings and crlf the EditorConfig row (end of line), encoding its charset, hotkey and keybinding the shortcuts, colour scheme the themes, soft wrap the wrapping rows, and gutter the line numbers. A command name finds the Keymaps page and puts your words in its shortcut filter.

• Ctrl+F (Cmd+F on macOS) goes to the search box from anywhere in the window. Typing a letter or digit while the sidebar has the focus starts a search, and Down in the search box goes back to the sidebar.
• Escape clears the search; a second Escape closes the window.
• @modified in the search box shows only the settings you changed; see Settings you changed.
• A command that opens Settings on a page, such as Snippet: Manage… or Settings Sync: Set Up…, clears the search first. Opening the window again keeps the last search, selected so that typing replaces it.

Config directory

The folder is chosen by this precedence:

~ is your home directory; on Windows that is %USERPROFILE%, so the default folder is %USERPROFILE%\.editora.

Use --dev to run a development instance that never touches your everyday settings or session. The live path is shown in About Editora. See the command-line reference for all the flags.

Two editors on one config folder

A second launch normally goes to the editor that is already running on the same config folder, so one folder has one process. Starting another with --new-instance gives two processes that share the folder. That is safe: each one writes only what it changed, so settings, sessions, projects, notes, bookmarks, breakpoints, macros, the dictionary, and Local History from both are kept.

The second process shows a one-time notice in its status bar. A change made in one process appears in the other only after that one restarts, and when both change the same setting or entry, the one saved last wins. Settings sync runs only in the first process.

Files

Preferences, sessions, and list files are JSON. If settings.json is absent, Editora converts an existing settings.toml automatically. Once the JSON replacement has been written safely, the old file is renamed to settings.toml.migrated and kept, because the JSON file does not carry over its comments.

Safety copies

These folders and files hold copies Editora makes before it replaces something. They are created only when needed.

A config file that cannot be read is never silently replaced by defaults: the original is copied to <name>.corrupt.bak and the problem is reported in the status bar at startup.

Inside a project

Two files live in the project itself rather than in your config directory, so they can be committed and shared:

A project’s .editora/settings.json can set only these:

{
  "version": 2,
  "editor": { "tabSize": 2, "rulers": [100], "trimTrailingWhitespace": true },
  "buildCommands": { "maven": "./mvnw" },
  "lspEnabled": { "rust": false }
}

Appearance, keymap and fonts stay personal, because checking out a repository should not rearrange somebody else’s editor. Trimming trailing whitespace and the final newline exist only per project: on your own they are left to .editorconfig. A value out of range is ignored rather than changed to fit.

• Trust. The project’s values apply only once you trust the folder (Project: Trust This Project’s Settings, lsp.trustProjectSettings, or Trust Folder… in Settings). Without trust, a project can still turn a language server off, since that only runs less, and set the Bash server’s options other than its program paths and explainshell server.
• .editorconfig wins where it says something: the project’s values take the place of yours, and a file’s .editorconfig rules still come first.
• In Settings. In a project window, Settings has a User | Project switch at the top. In User, every row edits your own settings, and a row the project sets says “Overridden by this project”. In Project, only the rows listed above can be changed; each shows the project’s value, or yours as a starting point, and a change is written to the project’s file, keeping the rest of it. A row the project sets says “Set for this project” and has Use my setting, which removes the project’s value. While the folder is not trusted, the bar says so and has Trust Folder…, and the rows say the value is not applied until the folder is trusted.
• A file written by a newer Editora is not changed from Settings; edit it as a file instead. A remote project’s file is not read.

Project: Edit Project Settings… (project.editSettings) creates the file with an example. An existing project TOML file remains readable and is converted when you open Edit Project Settings. See projects.

Preferences (settings.json)

Edit in the Settings window, or directly:

{
  "fontFamily": "JetBrains Mono",
  "fontSize": 14,
  "theme": "Editora Dark",
  "tabSize": 4,
  "autoSave": "afterDelay"
}

autoSave accepts off, afterDelay, or onFocusChange. Text zoom is stored separately as fontZoom (adjusted with C-= / C-- / C-0 or Ctrl+wheel). While it is not 100%, the Appearance page says so, with a Reset zoom link.

Editing settings.json by hand

The Path link on the Advanced page opens settings.json in an editor tab. Saving it there applies it at once in every window, Settings windows included, and the status bar says “Applied the saved settings.json.” A file that is not valid JSON applies nothing; fix it and save again. Changes made with another program apply the next time Editora starts.

Under the path, the Advanced page lists the values that are not used as written:

• a key that is not a setting: it is ignored and removed at the next save;
• a value of the wrong type: the default is used;
• a value that was changed to fit, such as a font size of -5, used as 6.

Containers

containerEngine is the command Editora runs for a project whose tools run in a container: blank (the default) means docker; podman works too, and so does a command line such as flatpak-spawn --host docker. It is the Container engine field in Settings → Remote. containerBindings remembers the container you picked for each project folder with Containers: Run This Project’s Tools in a Container…, from folder path to container name; Containers: Run This Project’s Tools Here removes the folder’s entry. Whether a container or WSL distribution may run a project’s tools is kept in connections.json, with the hosts’ answers.

Rulers and indent guides

These are the rows under Settings → Editor → Display:

languageRulers maps a language to its own columns, used instead of rulers for files in that language; an empty list means that language has no rulers. Columns run from 1 to 1000. An .editorconfig max_line_length replaces the first ruler (see EditorConfig).

The palette sets the same values: Editor: Set Rulers… (editor.setRulers), Editor: Set Rulers for This Language… (editor.setLanguageRulers, for the current file’s language; leave it blank to go back to the global rulers), View: Toggle Rulers (view.toggleColumnRuler) and View: Toggle Indent Guides (view.toggleIndentGuides). Indent guides are faint vertical lines at each indentation level, carried through blank lines and coloured by the theme; they are hidden in Zen and Simple UI modes and in large-file mode.

{
  "rulers": [80, 120],
  "languageRulers": { "java": [100], "python": [79, 88], "markdown": [] },
  "showIndentGuides": true
}

Word wrap

Two rows under Settings → Editor → Display, one for code and one for prose (see Word wrap):

View: Toggle Word Wrap (view.toggleWordWrap) flips whichever of the two governs the file in front.

Schema versioning

Each structured config file carries a schemaVersion; in Editora 0.23.0 settings.json is at version 140. Editora migrates older files forward automatically on read. A file written by a newer Editora than you’re running is backed up to <name>.v<n>.bak and defaults are loaded, so an older build never clobbers a newer config. When you return to the newer build, it puts that copy back, provided the file left in its place still holds only defaults.

Export and reset

• Export Configuration… (Settings → Advanced, or config.export) zips the active config folder into a timestamped archive in your home directory. .bak backups and installed plugins are included. Local History is left out, because it holds the text of your files rather than configuration. A dialog asks before exporting when there is something sensitive to leave out:

  • AI API keys kept in the system keychain are never exported. Keys kept in settings.json, where there is no keychain, are blank in the exported settings.json and its backups unless you tick Include AI API keys. A key is a billable credential. When keys were left out, the status bar says so.
  • The HTTP client’s response history is left out unless you tick Include HTTP response history: saved responses hold response bodies and full request URLs, which can contain tokens or keys.

  A password or token in the Settings sync repository URL is always removed from the export. Runtime files are never included: downloaded language servers and debug adapters, the installed ShellCheck and shfmt, the Typst CLI, jdtls workspaces, the sync/ folder, the lock files, the MCP endpoint file with its live token, and the session log.

• Reset to Defaults (the window’s footer, or Settings → Advanced) asks first, and Cancel is the default button. The dialog lists what is reset and what is kept, and names the backup it is about to write.

  • Reset: appearance, editor and language settings, the keymap choice (back to Emacs), tool and server commands, AI and language-server options, external tools, TODO patterns, the toolbar layout, and plugins (turned off).
  • Kept: AI API keys, the Sync connection, saved Remote sites, text zoom, your custom shortcuts (stored with the keymap you made them in; shortcuts of macros, external tools and run configurations come along to the default keymap), snippets, templates, abbreviations, macros, and the personal dictionary. A Local History limit that is higher than the default is kept too, so a reset never deletes revisions.

  Before anything is reset, the current preferences are saved beside settings.json as settings.json.before-reset-<date>.bak, and the status bar names that file. If the copy cannot be written, nothing is reset.

• Import Configuration… (Settings → Advanced, or Configuration: Import from Zip, config.import) reads a zip made by Export Configuration. Its dialog lists the parts: preferences, the keymap and key bindings, external tools, snippets, file templates, abbreviations, the personal dictionary, macros, your own themes, Remote sites, bookmarks, notes and breakpoints, and plugins. Each part says whether the zip has it and what it would replace, add and remove here. Untick a part to keep yours. Bookmarks, notes and breakpoints (they name files by the other computer’s paths) and plugins (they run code) start unticked.

  • A part you import replaces yours as a whole. A blank AI API key in the zip keeps the key you have.
  • Window layouts, recent files, projects, trusted folders and Local History belong to the other computer and are never imported; the dialog says how many files it leaves out.
  • Before anything is replaced, your current configuration is copied to backups/ in the config folder.
  • Preferences, key bindings, external tools, snippets, templates, abbreviations and the dictionary apply in every open window at once. Macros, themes, Remote sites, bookmarks and plugins apply after a restart, which the last dialog offers with Restart Now.
  • A file that is not a zip, a zip with no settings.json at its top, an entry outside the config folder, a zip larger than an export would be, or an export from a newer Editora is refused, and nothing is imported.

• Restore from Backup… (Settings → Advanced, beside Reset to Defaults) lists those backups, newest first, and puts the one you pick back. The settings in force are saved as a new backup first, so a restore can be undone the same way.

More

• Keymaps and rebinding: Keymaps & keybindings.
• Themes, fonts, and zoom: Themes & fonts.
• Snippets and templates: Snippets & templates.
• The same snippets, abbreviations, templates, and dictionary on every computer: Settings sync.

Full internals live in the README.