Settings overview
The three bands and how to find a setting.
What it's for
Settings is twelve panes, and that is the right number — every one is a real thing that has to live somewhere, and folding them into each other is how grab-bag panes get made. What changed is the order. The panes are grouped by when you come here, not by subject: is this something you set up once, something you touch between drops, or something advanced?
Come here to activate a licence, turn on sync, lock the machine, or wire up webhooks — and use the filter box when you already know the name.
Find a pane fast
Type into the filter at the top of the nav and the list narrows as you type. Two things it does on purpose:
- The pane you are on always stays listed, match or not — it carries an
· opentag, so you never lose your place mid-word. - A query that matches nothing says so, rather than leaving one unrelated pane on screen looking like a filter that broke.
Grouped by when you come here
Where the security controls live
The lock, the recovery kit, the crash-report and update switches, and the map of what leaves this machine all sit under Security & privacy, in the Between drops group — not under Appearance, where they used to hide. Nobody looking for "lock my accounts with a password" thinks Appearance.
The pages under Settings
For the full account of what stays on your machine and what reaches our servers, see What we can see.