Settings and appearance

Every choice is a command of the palette: type its name, and see the result at once.

Theme

The half-filled circle at the bottom of the rail, or theme in the palette.

• 13 themes: Bref Dark and Bref Light, Dracula, One Dark, Gruvbox (dark and light), Nord, Catppuccin (Mocha and Latte), Tokyo Night, Rosé Pine, Solarized (dark and light).
• Each theme is applied as you move through the list, so you see it before choosing. Enter keeps it, Esc goes back to the one you had.
• Default follows the light or dark setting of your system, with Bref Light or Bref Dark.
• In every theme, links, secondary text and the titles of colored panels are adjusted to a contrast of at least 4.5:1 (WCAG AA).

The look. The window is a warm ground, a little darker than the page in every theme. The note, the panel and the right dock lie on it as rounded sheets, eight pixels apart. Page titles are in a serif, while note titles follow your font.

• The active pane of a split has a thin accent ring.
• The open row of a list, a tag in the text, a commented passage and the current tab take a quiet tint of the accent.
• Tables and code blocks have a rounded band.
• Menus, the palette, help and notices float above, with a shadow.

Fonts

Bref carries IBM Plex Sans (text), IBM Plex Mono (code) and IBM Plex Serif (page titles), under the SIL Open Font License (assets/fonts/). So it looks the same everywhere, with nothing to install.

• Type font in the palette to choose another font, for the app or for the code, among those installed on your system. Type in the list to filter it.
• Ideograms and emoji, which Plex does not draw, come from a font of your system.
• A variable font cannot be emboldened. See Troubleshooting.

Text size

Ctrl + + and Ctrl + - change the size, Ctrl + 0 restores the default.

Headings, code and the width of the text column scale with it. The interface around the note (panel, rail, menus, palette, help) follows too, from 85 % to 150 %, so it stays usable at either end.

Page width

page width in the palette sets how wide the text column is: narrow, normal, wide, or the full window.

wide tables in the palette chooses what a table wider than the text does:

• center (the default): it spills out on both sides of the column, centered on the window;
• column: it stays in the column, and scrolls sideways.

A small table keeps its own size, and nothing goes past the window.

Formatting bar and animations

• formatting bar in the palette shows or hides the formatting bar under the note.
• animations in the palette turns the short fades off. When on, the panel, the formatting bar and a folder of the tree fade in over about 0.13 s as they open. Nothing moves on typing, scrolling or the caret, and no fade delays a result. Hovers and closing are instant.

Language

French if the system language is French, English otherwise. Bref asks the system (Windows, macOS), or reads LC_ALL, LC_MESSAGES and LANG (Linux, or any system when started from a terminal).

The settings file

These choices are kept in a file named settings, in the configuration folder. It holds one key=value per line:

Changing a shortcut

The help panel (F1) lists every shortcut, and lets you give any of them other keys.

• Change: click the keys of a row, or move to it with Down and press Enter. The row waits, and the next combination you press becomes its shortcut, at once. Esc cancels. Backspace leaves the action with no shortcut.
• Conflicts: a combination already used where the action applies is not taken. The row says by which action. Enter (Replace) gives it to the new one, and the other is left without a shortcut. The same keys in two views that never meet (a table and a diagram) are not a conflict.
• Refused keys: a key alone that types text, and the keys the text and the views need (Enter, Tab, the arrows…), are refused, with the reason. A combination your system usually keeps for itself is accepted with a warning.
• Reset: a changed row is highlighted and has a default button. Reset all, at the top of the panel, puts every shortcut back.
• The right-click menus and the palette show the keys in effect next to each action, so a change made here shows there too.
• Rows without a button are not key bindings (a click, a palette command, something you type). The search finds them, but they cannot be changed.

The keys file. Only what you changed is kept, one action=keys line each, in the keys file of the configuration folder, next to settings. secondary stands for Cmd on macOS and Ctrl elsewhere. A line that cannot be used (unknown action, unreadable keys, keys already taken) is ignored and reported at launch; the default stays.