13.1.5. Preferences and appearance

Edit → Preferences (the application menu on macOS) opens the settings dialog. You can leave almost everything in it alone – the defaults are the configuration the rest of this chapter describes – but a few categories are worth knowing about.

13.1.5.1. Interface and themes

The Environment → Interface page selects the theme. The IDE ships with dark (the default) and light themes, and the editor’s syntax colours follow the theme automatically. The same page holds the user-interface language and display-scaling options.

Day-to-day layout lives outside the dialog. Each bottom pane – the serial terminal, the search results – has a toggle button in the status bar; the side panes collapse when you drag their splitters shut and reopen from the drawer arrows at the window edges; and the Window menu’s Full Screen (Ctrl+Shift+F11) gives a demo or a wall-mounted monitor the whole screen.

13.1.5.2. Text editor settings

The Text Editor category controls the editing surface: Font for typeface and size; Display for line numbers, whitespace visualization, and text wrapping; Behavior for indentation – tab width, spaces versus tabs – and automatic whitespace cleanup. You can also change the font size on the fly with Ctrl++ / Ctrl+- / Ctrl+0, or with the mouse wheel while holding Ctrl.

Keyboard shortcuts are fixed in OpenMV IDE. Each one is shown beside its menu entry, and this chapter quotes the important ones where the feature comes up.

13.1.5.3. Other categories

The Python and Copilot categories configure the editor’s language intelligence – the bundled Python language server and the optional GitHub Copilot sign-in. The remaining categories belong to the Qt Creator core and rarely need attention.