Settings

Settings are how you author and view, not part of what you are designing. They are never written into the .exw file and never appear in undo. They are yours rather than any one document’s: one set, carried across every design you open, and kept between sessions.

Two surfaces show them: the quick strip pinned at the top of the left panel, and the Settings window behind its gear.

The quick strip

Grid shows or hides the grid overlay, and Snap turns grid snapping on or off. Both light while they are on. They are the two you reach for in the middle of a gesture, which is why they are the only settings with a permanent seat.

The gear opens the Settings window, and a second click closes it again.

The Settings window

A floating window carrying every setting, including the ones set rarely. Close it from the gear or from its own ✕.

Grid

Show grid and Snap to grid are the strip’s two toggles under their full names.

Pitch is a single value in µm doing both jobs: the spacing of the fine grid lines and the lattice a snap rounds to, so what you snap to is what you see. Every tenth line is drawn brighter. Drag the field to scrub the value or type one and press Enter; it will not go below 1 µm.

The lattice is measured from the world origin rather than from your design, and in 3D the grid is drawn on the active layer’s plane — so it moves with the layer you are working in.

Viewport

Inactive layer mute sets how far the layers that are not the active one desaturate toward gray, from 0 (every layer at full color) to 1 (inactive layers fully gray). The viewport follows the slider as you drag it. The active layer is always vivid, so this is the strength of the contrast rather than a color of its own.

Updates

Check for a new version at startup is on by default, and the dim line under it states what the check sends: your version and your operating system, nothing else. That request is the only thing Experiware sends anywhere.

The automatic check runs once a launch, in the background, and stays quiet unless there is something newer — a failed check says nothing, because you did not ask. When it does find a release, the update banner appears under the menu bar. Help → Check for Updates… asks on demand, reports either way, and runs even with this checkbox clear (Menus & files).

Grid snapping

Snapping applies wherever a gesture sets a position: moving a child, placing a point or a component, and each vertex you place while drawing a channel or a region. The position rounds to the nearest grid intersection.

Hold Ctrl to invert the setting for that one gesture — with snapping on it moves freely, with snapping off it snaps — so neither answer traps you mid-drag. Shift is already the axis lock, which is why the inverter is Ctrl.

Preferences that live elsewhere

Two more settings behave exactly like these but sit where they are used: the explode gap, on the Layers zone, and the default channel width, in the toolbar’s Draw channel options. Both are preferences in the same sense — outside the design, outside undo, kept between sessions.

The two panel widths and the zone heights you drag to are stored the same way, which is why a layout survives a restart (Window & panels).

The preferences file

Everything on this page is written to settings.json under %APPDATA%\Experiware, and read back at launch. The write follows the change rather than waiting for you to quit, so a session that ends badly still leaves your settings behind; a drag writes once, when you release it.

Delete the file to return every setting to its default. A file that is missing, unreadable, or written by a different version is not an error — whatever cannot be read falls back to its default, so moving between versions never costs you a launch.

Experiware Guide