Settings, Section by Section
Reach Settings from the foot of either workspace toolbar, or from its menu in Flyout mode. Every preference in the panel lives here, organized into ten sections under four group captions.
A section nav, not a stacked scroll
Settings isn't one long page you scroll through. It's a left-hand nav plus a single detail pane, and the ten sections are grouped under four captions:
| Group | Sections |
|---|---|
| Library | Library · Backup & restore |
| Panel | Appearance · Shortcuts |
| Editor | Diagnostics · Applying |
| System | License · Companion · MCP Bridge · About |
On a narrow panel, the nav collapses to an icon strip that still reaches all ten sections; only the section you're currently on shows its label, the rest stay icon-only.
The toolbar's Settings action is a toggle, not a one-way door: press it again from Settings and you go back to whatever you were on — the editor, or the library view you came from.
Every switch in Settings sits to the left of its label, with the explanatory note underneath lined up to the label rather than the switch, so a column of settings reads down the labels instead of zig-zagging around the controls.
These screenshots were captured in an earlier beta. Toolbar and Library layouts have since changed; the written instructions on this page describe v0.145.4. See A Tour of the Panel for the current controls.
Appearance
- Editor toolbar — Auto, Small, Medium, Large, or Flyout. Auto chooses the largest toolbar that fits. Flyout replaces it with a menu opened by the eXLib glyph in the status-bar corner. The menu command is rebindable under Shortcuts.
- Rail labels — Icons only or Icons + labels for the shared workspace toolbar.
- Panel labels — Icons only or Icons + labels for buttons living inside panel headers and bodies — the Author view's header row, the Pseudo Effect Authoring header verbs, and similar. This is independent of Rail labels, so you can run a dense icons-only rail while keeping labeled buttons inside panels, or the other way around.
- Sidebar side — Left or Right; places the shared toolbar on either side.
- Tooltips — a checkbox to suppress all hover hints across the panel.
- Notifications — a checkbox for non-error toasts (Pulled/Applied/Auditioned/Captured). Errors always show regardless of this setting. It's also bound to a rebindable Toggle Notifications command. Re-enabling shows a confirmation toast; disabling is silent by design.
Library
This section shows the resolved on-disk root path for your library, with a Copy button, plus live expression and folder counts. A short note reminds you the corpus was seeded on first run and that external edits are watched live — see The Library Is a Real Folder for what that means in practice.
Diagnostics and Applying
Diagnostics holds the verbosity controls covered in full on Tuning What You're Told: three category groups, an Advanced per-rule override list, and the Educational-hovers toggle. It governs what the editor tells you about your code, and nothing else — the logging controls live under Companion, with the thing they collect logs about.
Applying is kept separate from Diagnostics on purpose: it governs how much checking happens before a Variables session's controls actually get created and the expression gets set — Apply's own gate, not the editor's live squiggles.
Backup & restore
Two safety nets live here, and they're intentionally separate: a launch autobackup that
keeps the newest 30 date-stamped .exlib archives in eXLib's own system folder without
you doing anything, and one manual backup verb that opens a save dialog so you choose
exactly where a snapshot goes. Restoring an archive — automatic or manual — runs through
the same import pipeline as any other .exlib file. See
Autobackup & Restore and
.exlib Archives for the full picture.
Companion
Two cards. The first is Native accelerator — install, update, or check the companion plugin's state; it's the same card described in full on The Native Companion, including why it matters and how the install works.
The second is Debug logging, and it lives here because the logs it governs are the panel's and the companion's:
- Debug logging — a switch reading Verbose panel & companion logs, off by default. Turning it on adds detailed technical entries — event counters, timings, error codes — to eXLib's local log files. The card states the real boundary: eXLib avoids expression source and hides the account-name prefix of home paths, but file/item names and host error details can appear, so review an exported bundle before sharing it.
- Export debug bundle — writes one text file to your Desktop and reports "Saved to your Desktop" with the full path.
See Sending Debug Logs for the exact sequence.
License and MCP Bridge
License shows the aescripts entitlement state and the complete customer help surface: interactive activation/check, registration refresh, the product-update preference and manual update check, support, and confirm-gated deactivation. A development bypass is visibly marked non-distributable, and release packaging fails closed without the authentic eXLib product identity. See Licensing & Activation.
MCP Bridge is a separate trust surface for an external AI client. It names the connected peer, controls the master switch and access tier, exposes the live AE grant and explicit Leeroy standing authorization, manages pairing/reset, and offers one-click client configuration. See The MCP Bridge for the complete authorization model.
About and the build stamp
The running version and a full build stamp — rendered as version · short git SHA · build date — plus a pointer to the design reference material. The same stamp is logged
at boot, so any screenshot or bug report traces back to an exact commit. See
Troubleshooting for how to use it when reporting a
problem.