Settings

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The Settings page has two parts: Application and Project.

1. Application (stored in the data folder, per computer)

Item	Description
Interface language	中文 / English. With English, the User guide buttons open this English guide
Theme	Follow system / Light / Dark; the skin’s palette switches according to this
Autosave interval	In seconds; 0 turns it off. The crash-recovery snapshot every 5 seconds is independent of this
Backups to keep	Before every save, the previous file is copied to Backups/; beyond this number, the oldest are deleted
Reopen last project on launch
Check for new versions automatically	A few seconds after launch the app asks GitHub whether there is an update, then keeps asking every few minutes while it is open, and shows a notice at the bottom right as soon as a new version is out. After Later, the same version isn’t shown again during this session; Skip this version never shows it again; the whole check can be turned off here. For downloading and installing, see Updates below
Check for new versions every … minutes	5 minutes by default, 1–1440 allowed; has no effect while automatic checks are off
Highlight duplicate entries	Rows with identical headwords in the lexicon are shaded pale yellow; turned off, only the warning icon remains
Show the “?” usage hints next to panels	The small round question marks next to modules and inspector panels, each giving a one-line explanation on hover
Examples shown under an entry	3 by default; an entry lists this many, and the rest are under See all examples
Mark paradigm-derived forms with a gear ⚙	Distinguishes derived values from hand-entered ones on the entry card; turn it off if you don’t want the mark
Register labels on entry cards	Default: a boxed short form — the first character in Chinese (文, 古), abbreviations in English (lit., arch.); choose Boxed full name to write them out in full
Pronunciation brackets	Broad /…/ (default), narrow […], or none; both entry cards and the lexicon’s pronunciation column follow it
Show the guided tour every time User guide is clicked	Off by default: each module’s tour runs automatically only once, and after that User guide opens this site directly; turned on, the tour runs every time. The checkbox in the dialog at the end of a tour is the same switch

Window and panel sizes (inspector width, lexicon column widths, the chosen skin) are also kept in your local preferences and restored next time. The default window is 1700 × 900 (the whole work area if the screen is smaller): with a side panel open on the start page, the row of buttons at the bottom still fits on one line in English, and the start page doesn’t need scrolling even with the “restore unsaved work” bar showing and the new-project form open. Windows saved by older versions that are smaller than this are enlarged once.

Updates

Click Download & install in the notice:

1. The installer is downloaded inside the app (with progress); nothing happens until you click. An installed Windows version only downloads the parts that differ from the previous version (usually just a megabyte or two for small changes), and checks the reassembled file against the checksum on the Release. If it doesn’t match, the Release lacks update information, or anything goes wrong along the way, it switches to downloading the full installer automatically — so what gets installed is always identical to the installer on the Release. This applies from the update after an installed 0.8.1 release onwards; older versions, the portable build and locally built packages still download the full installer. macOS downloads the full zip for your chip (the native build if you are running the Intel build on Apple silicon) and checks it against the sha256 that GitHub computes for the file. How each download went is recorded in update.log in the data folder;
2. Once downloaded, the current project is saved first (your project files are never touched);
3. The installed Windows version installs silently and reopens automatically, using your previous install folder and options; the portable build (unzipped and run directly) shows the installer wizard so you can choose a folder. macOS unpacks the zip, checks that it is a complete new version, and after quitting replaces Qonlang in its original location with the new one and reopens automatically (if the replacement fails, the old app is put back; this applies from the update after 0.8.3 is installed). If Qonlang sits somewhere it can’t be replaced — opened directly from the dmg or from the Downloads folder (macOS moves such apps to a read-only temporary location), or in a folder without write permission — it downloads the dmg instead and opens it, and the notice tells you to drag Qonlang into Applications to replace the old one; after that it is the same as Getting started · Installing and launching (including the Gatekeeper workaround). On Linux, the folder containing the downloaded package is opened.

Update checks send the ETag from the previous check to GitHub, so an unchanged Release doesn’t count against the anonymous API limit of 60 requests per hour; when rate-limited, the last result is reused. If the notice appeared before your platform’s installer had been uploaded to the Release (the Windows and macOS packages are uploaded one after the other), a later check replaces it with one you can download and install directly.

2. Project (stored in the project file)

Item	Description
Project name, author, description
Definition languages	Comma-separated language codes such as zh, en. Multilingual text — senses, dimension names, morpheme meanings and so on — is shown and falls back in this order
Morpheme boundary symbols	Space-separated, - and = by default; treated as explicit boundaries when the corpus is tokenised. Adding ' makes the apostrophe a boundary too, restoring the vowel dropped in a contraction (t'am = ta + am)
Tokenization	How corpus text is split into words: By whitespace (default) / By character (for writing without spaces, as in Chinese or Japanese) / Custom separator (a JS regular expression; an invalid one falls back to whitespace)
Font for language data	A project-level font (headwords, IPA, etc.), also used by dictionary exports; empty means the default
Entry image size	Every image is cropped to this pixel size (default 320×240); after changing it, newly imported images use the new size and existing ones are unchanged
Default language	The current language when the project is opened

3. Exporting as a folder or as one CSV

Export as folder splits the project into a folder: project.json (metadata and settings), languages.json, lexemes.json, morphemes.json, paradigms.json, sentences.json, phrasebook.json… plus a .txt for each rule set and doc pages as docs/*.md. Good for keeping in git and reading diffs. A folder can also be imported back into a single file.

Export as one CSV puts the whole project into one spreadsheet file: the first line is a format marker, followed by one table after another (each starting with a #table,table name,Chinese name line, followed by a line of column names). Project information, languages and phonemes, orthographies, scripts and glyphs, rule sets, parts of speech and dimensions, morphemes, entries and senses, paradigms, sentences, phrases, abbreviations and docs are all in it. Nested content is split into sub-tables whose @parent column points back to the id of the level above; column-name suffixes indicate types (:opt may be absent, ? may be empty, :num number, :bool true/false, :json complex content), and multilingual text such as names and definitions is split into columns like name.zh and name.en; columns starting with ~ (language names, part-of-speech names) are only there for readability. Content longer than 30,000 characters (embedded fonts, images) is split into chunks in a chunks table at the end, so Excel doesn’t truncate it.

After editing it in a spreadsheet program (changing text and adding rows both work; leave id empty on new rows and it is filled in automatically), pick the .csv in Open project to read it back. What you get is an unsaved project, and saving asks where to save it.

4. Clear data

Clear one module in one go, ready for a fresh import or a fresh start: lexicon, morphemes, corpus, phrasebook, documents, sound-change rule sets, paradigms, parts of speech, grammatical dimensions, inspector modules, abbreviations, scripts (all languages) and entry images. The drop-down shows the current number of items; clicking the red Clear asks for confirmation first, and Ctrl+Z undoes it afterwards.

5. Read-only mode

Export a read-only copy saves a copy of the project file with a read-only flag. When someone opens that file, the top bar shows a Read-only badge, editing controls are hidden and changes are never saved — good for sharing your work without worrying that it gets messed up. The original file is unaffected.

6. About

The version number, the data folder path (can be opened in the file manager) and the licence (MIT).

7. Connection hints

Closing the blue connection hints at the top of each page is remembered in the application preferences; to show them all again, delete dismissedHints from prefs.json in the data folder (a button will come in a later version).