solvecraft/docs/design/preferences

Preferences redesign: design reference

This folder holds everything the Preferences design boards know, so that nobody needs the design canvas to build a page. It belongs to tracker #9863 and was extracted from the 13 Prefs2_* boards (canvas version 202) plus four reference boards. Once merged it is authoritative: if a board and this folder disagree, fix this folder in a docs-only pull request.

Nothing in the redesign changes a default. It regroups settings, restyles their controls and adds the settings-profile switcher.

Files

File	What it holds
pages/<page>.md	One spec per page: sections in order, each control with its verbatim label, control type, the setting it edits, default, hover text, figure, and the mismatches with the code.
figures/*.light.svg, figures/*.dark.svg	Every illustration on the boards as a standalone SVG, verbatim geometry. figures/README.md states the house style.
measurements.md	Dialog frame, spacing, control sizes, radii, type sizes, as measured from the boards.
tokens.md	Every board colour mapped to a theme::Tokens field, or flagged "no token".
boards/	Not included: the boards are rendered from the canvas, which is private. The figures and the measurements replace them.

Pages: General, Appearance, Layout, Graphics, Design, Sketch, Tools, Navigation, 3D mouse, Shortcuts, Assistant, Plugins.

Page structure: 9 pages become 12, in four headings

General sits on top, ungrouped. Every heading holds at least two pages. The page list also shows a profile switcher card at its foot on every page.

Heading	Pages
(none)	General
Look	Appearance, Layout, Graphics
Work	Design, Sketch, Tools
Input	Navigation, 3D mouse, Shortcuts
Extend	Assistant, Plugins

Today's pages (PAGES in crates/ui-egui/src/prefs.rs): General, Interface, Design, Navigation, Keyboard Shortcuts, Sketch, Graphics, AI, Plugins. The old board's map (Prefs2_Map) showed "Sketch & selection" under Input and Graphics under "Display"; the later boards and tracker supersede it.

Where settings move

Setting group	From	To
Layout, toolbar, status bar, notices, menus, History and browser placement, dialog placement, toolbar tabs, navigation bar	Interface	Layout
Theme, theme options, viewport background, logo, scale and text, colour vision	Interface	Appearance
3D mouse (all of it, including the navigation bridge)	Navigation	3D mouse
Direct interaction, "Tool at the cursor"	Navigation	Tools
Hole, Extrude, Placement, Assembly Move (joint handles, near and far steps, ghost)	Design	Tools
"Axis distances in Measure"	Graphics	Tools
Sketch and selection	Sketch	Sketch
Largest file, network locations, slicer reuse, print-face highlight	General / Design	General > Files
Renderer, window system, graphics card	Graphics	Graphics ("This computer")
Ambient occlusion	Graphics > Edges and shading	Graphics > Current view (a fourth tile)
Origin plane names, hide-origin	Interface / Design	Design > Origin
Profiles	General	General > Profiles, plus the profile card in every page list

Settings profiles

crates/ui-egui/src/settings_profiles.rs holds the Interface, Navigation and Sketch preferences, language, shortcuts, toolbar and S-box favourites, and the imported theme in use. It excludes the 3D mouse, Graphics and the Assistant. Pages a profile stores (General for language, Appearance, Layout, Sketch, Navigation, Shortcuts) carry an In profile tag beside the page title, with the hover text "Saved in settings profiles". The profile card at the foot of the page list shows the active profile name, with a dot and the hover text "Changed since saved" when it was edited.

Five ways to show a setting

Way	Use
Picture cards	Options that look different.
Segmented	Two to four short options.
Checkbox	Explanation on hover (the (i) icon).
Stepper plus live sample	Numbers with their result.
List or table	Per-item data.

The checkbox, segmented, dropdown, slider, stepper and badge are existing ui_kit controls. New: the page-list group headings and profile card, the "In profile" tag, the picture card, toggle tile, preset card, hover-help icon and carousel (step 2 of #9863), the theme carousel and options panel, the layout preview, the navigation-bar editor and the colour vision sample row.

Design rules the boards follow

1. Few words. No explanatory paragraphs. Help moves to an (i) icon with a hover tooltip (the title text on the board, quoted verbatim in the page files). Visible text is labels, values and short badges ("Restart needed", "Desktop only", "Not on this GPU").
2. One illustration style: see figures/README.md.
3. Generous spacing: 38 px between sections (measurements.md).
4. Colours are the existing theme tokens, never literals; where a board colour has no token, tokens.md says so.
5. Section titles are plain text on the board and upper-cased by the style (text-transform: uppercase, 11 px, weight 600, tracking 0.07 em). Write them in sentence case in catalogs.

Reading a page file

Each control row is Label | control | edits | default | hover | figure | notes:

• Label and hover are verbatim from the board. Board spelling is UK English (Centre, Colour); the catalogs hold US text in en.json and the UK spelling in en-GB.json.
• Edits is the Prefs field (in crates/ui-egui/src/prefs.rs, the preference_settings! table) or the app/session field or command that the control changes, as of main at the time of writing. app.ui.* and app.session.* fields are session values that Preferences edits through its Snapshot.
• Default is the default of the field in Prefs::default().
• Notes flag every mismatch: a control with no setting behind it, a setting with no control on the board, a label that differs from the current catalog, and anything uncertain.

Controls with no board

Settings present in the code with no control on any board (not to be added by this redesign): parameters_apply_live (Parameters apply live) and personal_sheet_rules. Settings that exist only for other features and sit on no Preferences page (render_*, save_mesh_*, view_dxf_*, send_slicer, custom_slicers, easyprint_consent, update and similar memos) are also not on the boards.

Placeholder content (not to be built as drawn)

The boards show sample content. Build the real data, not these examples:

Page	Placeholder
General	Profile names (Laptop, Large monitor, Presentation), the network host chips (\\files.studio, \\nas01), "3 saved", "2 saved" crash reports, the update time.
Appearance	The "Studio glass" imported theme and its options; the sample "Extrude 112.5 mm" distance row.
Layout	The navigation-bar slot icons and names (Faces and edges, Spin, Projection, Ground shadow, Ambient occlusion) stand in for the app's own slots and icons; "10 of 16 slots".
Navigation	The mapping rows and the mouse figure show the Fusion-style mapping only as an example of the shape.
3D mouse	The device ("SpaceMouse Compact"), the live bars, and the button jobs (Open Preferences, View · Fit, View · Top, Hold Shift, Not assigned).
Shortcuts	The whole command list, groups and key assignments.
Assistant	Agent names and states (Claude Code, Codex CLI, Local model), "Signed in", "Key in environment".
Plugins	The three plugin cards (Gear generator, Bracket tools, Thread library), their versions, permissions and descriptions.

Known gaps

• The boards were checked in a browser in the light theme after the last edits; the dark half is generated from the same layout.
• Theme options follow the text of Theme_Options.dc.html; the Appearance board was not compared against its rendering.
• The graphics presets are the three in the code (Performance, Quality, Custom). An earlier board showed a fourth, "Balanced", which does not exist.
• Screenshots of the boards (boards/*.png) are not included. The canvas is private and the extracted figures, measurements and token map are the substitute.