Reference

Settings and hotkeys

Clew keeps its configuration small and legible: a handful of app-wide preferences, a handful of per-vault switches, and a hotkey editor that can rebind any command. This chapter is the reference for all of it — every settings section as it appears in the app, the difference between app-global and per-vault settings and where each lives on disk, how rebinding works, and the complete table of default hotkeys.

The settings tab

Press ⌘, (or Clew → Settings… on macOS, File → Settings… on Windows and Linux) and settings open as a tab in the workspace, not a floating dialog. It is a singleton: if a settings tab is already open anywhere — even in another split pane — the command focuses it rather than opening a second. Being a tab, it closes with ⌘W like anything else, and can sit in a split beside a note while you experiment. Every change applies immediately; there is no Save button.

App-global versus per-vault

Clew has exactly two configuration scopes, and the settings tab shows both:

• App-global settings — everything in the Appearance, Diary, Files, and Hotkeys sections — apply to every vault and are stored in clew-settings.json in the operating system's per-user application-data directory (alongside them, Clew keeps its recent-vaults list and the set of windows to restore at launch). Nothing app-global is written into any vault.
• Per-vault settings — the This vault section — are stored in .clew/vault-settings.json inside the vault itself, so they travel with it: clone or sync the vault and its behaviour comes along.

One section, TeX fragments, has a list in each scope: fragments you keep on this machine and fragments a vault carries with it, with the vault's winning where both use a name.

The settings sections

Appearance

Theme

Dark or light. See Theming and CSS snippets for what the switch reaches and how to restyle further.

New note tabs open in

Whether a freshly opened note tab starts in source mode, live edit, or reading mode. Navigating an existing tab keeps that tab's current mode; this setting governs new tabs only.

Explorer click opens files

Whether clicking a file in the explorer opens it in a new tab, or in the current tab, Obsidian-style.

Editor font size (px)

10–28, default 16. Applies live to every editor.

Editor line width (em)

20–120, default 44 — the measure of the editing column.

Fill column (hard-wrap)

40–120, default 72 — the column Fill paragraph (⌥Q) and auto-fill hard-wrap prose to. See Hard-wrapping paragraphs.

Link previews on hover

Always by default (linkPreview: hover); With ⌘ held (mod; Ctrl off the Mac) or Off (off). What hovering a link shows: link previews.

Footnotes in the margin (sidenotes)

sidenotes: auto (the default — a pane at least 960 px wide with room to the right of the text), on or off. See sidenotes.

The graph's References switch

Off by default (graphReferences): cited works as nodes in the graph, set by the switch on the graph itself.

Live preview of maths and diagrams while editing

On by default (previewPane: on | off): the rendering of the formula or diagram the cursor is in, beside it (the live rendering).

Auto-fill while typing

Off by default. Emacs' auto-fill-mode: typing a space past the fill column breaks the line behind the cursor. Applies live — no restart, no reopening tabs.

PDF paper size (reading-view export)

A4 (default), US Letter, Legal or Tabloid — the paper Export as PDF (reading view) prints onto. The LaTeX PDF takes its page size from the document's own class instead, and is not affected.

Live edit

App-global; see Live edit and the toolbar. Changes apply to open notes at once.

⌘E returns from reading mode to

Source mode (default) or live edit — for a tab that has not been edited yet. A tab that has remembers its own (defaultEditMode).

Reveal syntax for

The construct under the cursor (default) or the whole line (liveReveal: construct | line).

Typeset math in place

On by default (liveRenderMath); off leaves maths as source.

Render diagram and query fences in place

On by default (liveRenderFences): mermaid, the TeX figures, maps, queries, Dataview, Bases and rich directives as engine frames. Off leaves them as code.

Render embeds and media in place

On by default (liveRenderEmbeds): note, PDF, office, canvas and media embeds, @reveal, and HTML blocks with custom elements.

Rendered blocks kept alive (advanced)

4–64, default 16 (liveFrameCap) — how many engine frames one note keeps at once. Each costs memory (roughly 20 MB).

Editor toolbar

Show the toolbar

In live edit (default), in live edit and source mode, or never (editorToolbar: live | always | never). View → Editor Toolbar toggles it and remembers which of the first two it was (editorToolbarPrev).

Selection bubble over selected text

On by default (selectionBubble).

// menu: type // for the Format menu

On by default (slashCommands). Two slashes at the start of a line or after a space open the Format menu at the cursor, in source mode and live edit (the // menu).

Groups, in order

Tick the groups to show and order them with ▲▼; Reset restores the default (editorToolbarGroups, null meaning the default). The mode switch is always shown, last.

Diary

Mode

One note per day or Single log note — the two shapes a diary can take (see Daily notes and the diary).

Log note (log mode)

The note holding the whole diary in log mode; default Diary.md.

Folder (per-day mode)

Where daily notes are created; default Daily.

Date format

The file-name pattern for daily notes; default YYYY-MM-DD.

Template note (optional)

A note whose contents seed each new daily note.

PDF viewer

Chinese, Japanese and Korean fonts (pdfCjkFonts)

A PDF that uses CJK text without embedding its own fonts needs the reader to supply them. The four Noto packs are 139 MB — too much to put in every installer for the minority who need them, and not something to fetch mid-render — so they are downloaded once, on this button, and kept locally from then on. Nothing is fetched from the network while you read. The button becomes Remove once they are installed, which reclaims the disk.

Office documents

LibreOffice engine

The 51 MB engine behind office tabs, downloaded once on this button and verified against checksums pinned in the app. The same offer appears in the tab the first time an office document is opened; the button becomes Remove once installed. There is no settings key — whether the engine is on disk is the switch.

Files

Attachment folder

Where pasted and dropped files land; default Attachments (see Attachments and files).

Templates folder

Where Insert template… (⌘⌥T) looks for templates; default Templates.

TeX fragments

Named preamble text for the figures Clew typesets — the macros, colours and packages your ```latex, ```tex and ```tikz blocks share. Each row is a name and an editor; a figure asks for what it needs by name on its opening line (clew-fragments='math macros, colours'), and the text is inserted into that figure's preamble. There are two lists: Global, kept in clew-settings.json and offered in every vault on this machine, and This vault, kept in the vault's .clew/vault-settings.json and travelling with it. A vault fragment shadows a global one of the same name, and the row says so. Editing a fragment re-typesets the figures that use it. The full account, including where the text lands in each kind of block and what happens to a name nothing defines, is in Diagrams.

This vault

The per-vault settings, stored in .clew/vault-settings.json — eleven switches and fields, plus three lists (plugins, TeX fragments, and the two exclusion lists):

Note history (history)

On by default: before a save displaces an existing note or canvas, the old text is snapshotted into .clew/history/, with sensible rate-limiting and pruning. The switch stores a boolean; finer tuning is a hand-edited object. Clew for iOS reads the same key, so a synced vault keeps or stops history on every device. See Note history.

jmarkdown project (jmarkdownProject)

For vaults that are jmarkdown manuscripts — a book folder, say. Re-enables the engine's own-line [[file.md]] inclusion, so reading mode transcludes chapters exactly the way the jmarkdown command-line build does. The trade-off: a wikilink alone on its own line stops being a plain link while this is on. Open previews re-render as soon as the box is toggled.

Standard Markdown syntax (normalSyntax)

Disables the jmarkdown inline dialect, so *italic* and **bold** behave as they do everywhere else, while keeping math, citations, diagrams, and theorems. Renders and exports both honour it; the editor's dialect highlighting does not adapt yet. See The jmarkdown dialect.

Note API (noteApi)

Gives <script> elements in rendered notes a window.clew API — open notes, search, read and write notes and frontmatter, run commands, share state. Off by default, deliberately: with it on, notes are code. Enable it only for vaults you trust. See The Note API.

Bibliography file (bibliography)

A .bib file — a path from the vault root, or an absolute path — that every note in the vault resolves \cite commands against, with citation resolution switched on. Per-note Bibliography: properties still override it. See Citations and bibliographies.

Bibliography style (bibliographyStyle)

The vault's citation style: a name the engine ships (apa, chicago, harvard1, vancouver, bjps, ajp, econometrica, ergo) or a path to a custom .csl file. Notes override with a Bibliography style: property.

References panel (bibliographyPanel)

Turns on the Refs panel's This note mode: the active note's formatted references, even while the note is in source mode. The panel's Library is there regardless.

New drawings are saved as (excalidrawFormat)

Empty or markdown for Obsidian's .excalidraw.md; json for a plain .excalidraw. Clew reads and indexes both identically — the choice only matters to Obsidian, which can index a drawing solely through the markdown wrapper. See Drawings.

Pandoc citations (pandocCitations)

Reads [@key] and @key as citations alongside the \cite commands — the style Zotero and Better BibTeX export, and what a vault written for pandoc will be full of. Off by default, and worth understanding why: @ is jmarkdown's directive sigil, so with this on a bare @word that is not a registered directive is read as a citation key — an email address or an @mention in prose will change how it renders. See Citations.

Run dataviewjs blocks (dataviewJs)

Off by default. Obsidian's ```dataviewjs blocks are JavaScript rather than queries, so this is per-vault and off until you turn it on for a vault you wrote or trust; plain ```dataview queries always run. See Queries.

TeX fragments (texFragments)

Named preamble text this vault's figures can ask for by name, travelling with the vault — Diagrams → Fragments.

Listed but not indexed (unindexed)

Folders that stay in the explorer and open normally, but are not indexed and not watched: no backlinks, tags, search hits or quick-switcher entries, and no automatic refresh when another program writes to them. One pattern per line — Telling Clew to leave a folder alone.

Hidden entirely (hidden)

Folders treated as though they were not in the vault at all: not listed, not indexed, not watched, not published by a website export. Same patterns.

Plugins (plugins)

Below the switches, every plugin available here is listed with its version, surfaces, and whether it came from this vault's .clew/plugins/ or the global plugin folder (installed once, offered in every vault — there is a button to open it). Each has its own enable checkbox, and the enabled set is stored as an array of plugin ids in this vault: installing may be global, but enabling never is. A plugin is arbitrary code — enable only what you trust. See Vault plugins.

The hotkey editor

The final settings section lists every command Clew has — built-ins, all the formatting commands, and commands registered by enabled plugins — alphabetically, with a filter field at the top. Each row shows the command's current binding (a dash when unbound), a Set button, and a Reset button.

To rebind: filter to the command, press Set, and type the new chord — the row shows Press a shortcut… until you do (Esc cancels). The chord must include a modifier; the first full chord you press becomes the command's binding, replacing its defaults. Custom bindings are marked with an accent-coloured key cap, and Reset — enabled only on customized rows — restores the default. When the same chord is claimed by more than one command, both rows show it in red, and you should re-bind one of them: which command wins an ambiguous chord is not defined.

Overrides are stored (app-globally, keyed by command id) in clew-settings.json, so your keymap follows you across vaults. The command palette always displays current bindings, and the native menus do too: menu accelerators are display-only — Clew's own dispatcher handles every chord — so a rebound command shows its new chord in the menu and the old chord does nothing.

Chord notation

Internally, chords use CodeMirror's notation — Mod-Shift-p, Mod-Alt-ArrowLeft — where Mod is the platform command key: ⌘ on macOS, Ctrl on Windows and Linux. On macOS, Control is a separate modifier of its own (⌃), used for tab cycling because ⌘Tab belongs to the system; away from macOS such chords fold into the Ctrl key, so ⌃Tab reads as Ctrl+Tab everywhere. You never type this notation — the editor records chords from real keystrokes — but it is what appears in the settings file.

Default hotkeys — the complete table

Every default binding in Clew, grouped by area. This is the complete list: any command not shown here ships unbound and is reachable through the command palette, the menus, or a binding of your own. Shortcuts are shown in macOS notation — on Windows and Linux, read ⌘ as Ctrl and ⌥ as Alt.

Files

Navigation

Tabs and splits

View and panels

Editing

Native menu shortcuts

Two shortcuts are native menu items rather than commands, so they do not appear in the hotkey editor and cannot be rebound there:

Unbound by default

Everything else ships without a chord, waiting in the palette: creating folders and canvases, opening another vault, revealing the note in the file manager, bookmarking, pinning tabs, the diary calendar, the properties panel, the theme commands, all four exports, and the entire Format family — inline styles, headings, lists, alignment, alerts, tables, and block inserts, each a rebindable command — and live edit's own: the three View mode commands, Toggle editor toolbar, indent and outdent, the toolbar's inserts (link, attachment, table, callout, code fence, maths environment, figure, environment), and the Table: commands — insert and delete rows and columns, move them, align a column, edit a cell in place or the table as source. If you use one daily, give it a key.

Reference: where settings live

See also

• Navigation, tabs and splits — the commands most of these chords drive.
• Theming and CSS snippets — beyond the theme dropdown.
• Daily notes and the diary — what the Diary settings configure.
• The jmarkdown dialect — what the standard-syntax switch turns off.
• The Note API and Vault plugins — what the trust switches enable.