Settings View

The Settings view provides centralized configuration for all aspects of Crab Desktop — appearance, editor behavior, git preferences, integrations, and system diagnostics.

Accessing Settings

• Click the Settings (gear) icon in the activity bar
• Keyboard shortcut: Cmd+,

Layout

The Settings view uses a two-panel layout:

• Left panel — section navigation list (Appearance, Editor, Previews, Workspace, Diff, Commit, Notifications, Prefetch, Experiments, Integrations, Storage, Cache, Memory, Diagnostics, Shortcuts, Reset, About)
• Right panel — section content with form controls for the selected category

Sections

Appearance

• Theme — Dark, Light, High Contrast Dark, High Contrast Light, System (follows OS preference)
• Editor theme — syntax highlighting theme (One Dark Pro, Solarized, Monokai, Nord, etc.)
• Font size — global UI font size
• Workspace theme — per-repo theme override (useful for distinguishing multiple open repos)

Editor

• Font family — editor and diff font
• Font size — editor-specific font size
• Tab size — spaces per tab
• Word wrap — on/off/bounded
• Minimap — show/hide code minimap
• Line numbers — on/off/relative
• Bracket matching — highlight matching brackets

Previews

• Max preview size — skip previews for files above this size
• Parquet row limit — max rows to show in Parquet preview
• Image preview — enable/disable inline image rendering
• Notebook rendering — how to display Jupyter notebooks

Workspace

• Reopen repos on startup — restore previously open repos
• Default clone directory — where git clone puts repos
• File watcher — enable/disable live filesystem monitoring
• Ignored patterns — glob patterns to exclude from the tree

Diff

• Diff style — Unified or Split (side-by-side)
• Context lines — lines of context around changes (default 3)
• Whitespace — show/ignore whitespace changes
• Word diff — highlight word-level changes within lines
• Inline blame — show git blame annotations in diffs

Commit

• Commit template — default commit message template
• Conventional commits — enable type/scope prefix UI
• Sign commits — GPG/SSH signing (auto-detect key)
• Auto-stage on commit — stage all modified files before commit
• Spell check — check commit messages for typos

Notifications

• Desktop notifications — enable/disable OS notifications
• Terminal completion — notify when long commands finish
• Push/pull completion — notify on sync operations
• Quiet hours — suppress notifications during specified times

Prefetch Profiles

Configure which files to pre-download on clone/pull:

• Define glob patterns for auto-hydration
• Multiple profiles for different workflows
• Per-branch profile overrides

Experiment Tracking

• Provider — MLflow, Weights & Biases, or custom
• Endpoint URL — tracking server address
• API key — authentication (stored in keychain)
• Auto-log — automatically log metrics from workflow runs

Integrations (Forge)

• GitHub — OAuth token, default organization
• GitLab — access token, instance URL
• Bitbucket — app password, workspace
• Gitea — token, instance URL
• Status shows connection health and token expiry

Remote Storage

• Default remote — S3/GCS/Azure endpoint
• Region — cloud region
• Bucket — storage bucket name
• Credentials — AWS profile or explicit keys
• Encryption — client-side encryption settings

Cache

• Cache directory — where chunk cache lives
• Max cache size — eviction threshold
• Cache stats — current usage, hit rate
• Clear cache — button to purge all cached data

Memory

• Max log lines — ring buffer size for progress logs
• Terminal scrollback — lines per terminal session
• Heap limit — when to start evicting cached data
• Memory usage — current heap size display

Diagnostics

• Agent log level — verbosity of sidecar output
• Health refresh interval — how often diagnostics refresh
• Diagnostic bundle — copy logs and environment details for support

Shortcuts

• Keybinding editor — view and customize all keyboard shortcuts
• Conflict detection — highlights conflicting bindings
• Reset to defaults — restore original shortcuts
• Import/Export — share keybinding configurations

Reset

• Reset settings — restore all settings to defaults
• Clear state — purge localStorage and cached data
• Reset layout — restore default panel sizes and positions

About

• Version — app version, Electron version, Node version
• Agent version — Rust sidecar version
• Crab CLI version — installed CLI version
• System info — OS, architecture, memory
• Telemetry — opt-in/out of anonymous usage data
• Licenses — open-source license information

Scope System

Settings can be scoped:

• User (global) — applies to all repositories
• Workspace — applies only to the current repository

A scope chip next to each setting shows its current scope. Workspace settings override user settings.

Persistence

• User settings → localStorage (renderer) + main-settings.json (main process subset)
• Workspace settings → .crab/desktop/settings.json in the repo
• Secrets (tokens, keys) → OS keychain via safeStorage

Keyboard Shortcuts