Settings¶
The Settings screen controls how Collectary looks and behaves. Changes are saved to
%APPDATA%\Collectary\preferences.json and restored next time you open the app.
Appearance¶
Everything here updates live — no restart.
Theme and style¶
Pick a color theme: Light, Dark, Nord, Dracula, Solarized (light and dark), Catppuccin, Gruvbox, One Dark, High Contrast, or Graphite — a soft shades-of-grey dark theme with a blurple accent. The style dropdown sets the overall shape — Windows 11, Flat, or Classic — which controls corners and control sizes.
Customize colors¶
Customize colors layers your own palette on top of the chosen theme. Two modes:
- Easy — the five colours that matter most: accent, window background, surfaces/cards, main text, and sidebar. Changing the accent derives matching hover and pressed shades automatically.
- Expert — every background, text, border, sidebar, and danger colour the app uses.
The moment you change a colour or the accent, a small Custom (based on …) note appears under the colour-theme dropdown. It's there to remind you that what you're looking at is your own tweaked version of a built-in theme, not the theme as it ships — the dropdown still shows the theme you started from. Built-in themes always stay pristine: if you pick a different one from the dropdown while you have customizations, the app first asks whether to discard them, so a stray click can't quietly wipe a palette you spent time on. Reset colors clears your tweaks and returns to the chosen theme straight away.
Field label position¶
The app-wide default for where field labels sit in the item editor: beside, above, or adaptive (beside for single-column collections, above once a collection uses more). Any collection can override this; collections left on Inherit follow this setting.
Whichever you pick, beside never crowds the input on a small screen. As the editor gets narrow — on a phone, or when you shrink the window — the labels move above their inputs so they stay full-width and the form reads as a clean single column instead of a crushed side-by-side squeeze. Widen it again and the labels slide back beside their inputs. So you can leave it on beside and still get a comfortable editor everywhere.
Audio¶
When the app can record and play sound (the desktop and Android apps), an Audio section lets you choose which microphone Audio Note fields record from and which playback device they play back through. Both start on System default, so they follow whatever your operating system is using — pick a specific device only if you want to override that. The choice is app-wide and is used the next time you record or play a clip; the browser build has no audio, so the section is hidden there.
Language¶
Collectary is available in English and German. Pick a language and the UI updates immediately — no restart.
Sync¶
Settings is also where you configure syncing: the shared folder, auto-sync and its interval, and how long deletions are remembered. See Sync.
Account¶
A Switch profile button returns you to the profile screen without closing the app — the same as the button in the top-right of the main window. See Profiles.
Remembered automatically¶
Collectary also remembers smaller things — whether the sidebar was expanded, how you sized the panes — so the app looks the way you left it.