# 5. Configuring ViTables

As mentioned earlier, many aspects of the ViTables behaviour can be customized by you through the Settings ‣ Preferences command.

It shows a dialog offering you several customization possibilities. The dialog is made of three stacked pages, General, Look & Feel and Plugins.

The General page allows to change the ViTables behavior at startup. You can set the initial working directory to be that one from which ViTables is starting or to be the last used working directory. And you can recover your last working session.

The Look & Feel page allows to change visual aspects of the application such as fonts, colors or even the general style, so you can adapt the global aspect of ViTables to what would be expected on your platform.

From the Plugins page the plugins can be managed. You can enable or disable the available plugins. Changes in this page will take effect the next time you start ViTables.

The OK button will apply the new settings and make them permanent by saving them in the Windows registry, in a configuration file (on Unix platforms) or in a plist file (on Mac OS X platforms). Even if settings are stored in a plain text file editing it by hand is not recommended. Some settings, like fonts or geometry settings [1], are stored in a way not really intended to be modified manually.

Anyway it can be worth how settings are stored so let’s do it. The configuration file is divided into sections, labeled as [section_name]. Every section is made of subsections written as key/value pairs and representing the item that is being customized. Currently the following sections/subsections are available:

> [Geometry] HSplitter

>   the size of the horizontal splitter

> [Geometry] Layout

>   the position and size of toolbars and dock widgets

> [Geometry] Position

>   the position and size of the application window

> [Geometry] VSplitter

>   the size of the vertical splitter

> [HelpBrowser] Bookmarks

>   the list of current bookmarks of the help browser

> [HelpBrowser] History

>   the navigation history of the help browser

> [Logger] Font

>   the logger font

> [Logger] Paper

>   the logger background color

> [Logger] Text

>   the logger text color

> [Look] currentStyle

>   the style that defines the application look & feel. Available styles fit the most common platforms, i.e., Windows, Unix (Motif and SGI flavors), and Macintosh

> [Plugins] Enabled

>   the list of full paths of enabled plugins

> [Recent] Files

>   the list of files recently opened

> [Session] Files

>   the list of files and views that were open the last time ViTables was closed

> [Startup] lastWorkingDir

>   the last directory accessed from within ViTables via Open File dialog

> [Startup] restoreLastSession

>   the last working session is restored (if possible) which means that both files and leaves that were open in the last session will be reopen at application startup.

> [Startup] startupWorkingDir

>   possible values are current, and last. These values indicate how the application will setup the startup working directory.

> [Workspace] Background

>   the workspace background brush

Footnotes

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Entries in the Geometry section allow for keeping the aspect, size and position of the application window between sessions.