Settings

Settings hold the handful of choices that shape how Nodes looks, reads, and helps. Open them with ⌘,.

There are seven tabs:

• User - your user card: your tree, your node, connection, and tag counts, and up to three stickers, with re-catalog and Share beneath it.
• Collectibles - pick a tree under Your Tree (see your garden) and put stickers from the Sticker Book on your card.
• General - what happens while you write, what goes in and out of your library, and how a page looks.
• Shortcuts - the key behind each command.
• Agent - the background agent's home, and where you choose the model behind the on-device AI.
• Edition - what you own and what each edition adds, alongside restore purchases.
• About - the version and a link to the website.

Importing and exporting also live in the File menu - File ▸ Export… (⇧⌘E) and File ▸ Import… (⇧⌘I) - see import and export.

Rest the pointer on any section heading and Settings says what that section is for.

General

General is three cards: Writing, Library, and Page.

Writing

What happens while you write:

• New node title - the name a new node gets until you rename it, with today's version shown beneath it. Date and time follows your Mac's region and your 12- or 24-hour choice. Sortable puts the year first and writes the same string on every Mac, so sorting by name sorts by when you made them. Nodes you already have keep their names.
• Auto-close brackets - automatically inserts the matching closing character when you type (, [, or {. Typing [[ closes to [[]], ready for a link, whichever way this is set.
• Markdown list helpers - Tab indents list items, Return continues a list or a quote (or clears an empty marker), - turns into a bullet, and numbered lists carry on. With them off, task boxes still show and tick.
• Helper hints - section headers in the node inspector and on tag pages narrate what a click will do while you hover a control.

Library

What goes in and out of your library:

• Show nodes in Spotlight - on by default. It lets Spotlight find your nodes by title, tags, and text; switch it off and they leave Spotlight's results. See search.
• Import - markdown, text, PDF, and image files. open import… brings the main window forward with the same Import dialog as File ▸ Import…, so bringing files, a folder, or a library in doesn't mean hunting through the File menu. See import and export.
• Archive - save archive… writes your whole library into a single .nodes file - every node, tag, and link - and the line beneath it counts the nodes, tags, and stickers going in. The archive restores exactly on import. This is the copy you carry: put it on an external drive, in a cloud folder, or on another Mac.
• Automatic snapshots - daily recovery points of your whole library, kept inside Nodes on this Mac. snapshot now takes one on the spot, snapshots opens the list, and every restore sets your current library aside first, so it can be undone. The switch turns the whole thing off and deletes what's been kept. See library snapshots for the full picture.

Spotlight and Import work in every edition. The archive and snapshots come with Alexandria; until then one card stands in for both, and it says plainly that no recovery points are being kept.

This is all separate from File ▸ Export…, which exports nodes as files.

Page

How a page looks:

• Font - the font your notes are written in. Click the row to open the font catalog: a card for each of the 24 fonts, every one set in your quote, with a button to use it. The line at the top filters the catalog by style or alphabet, and ‹ General takes you back. Two fonts, SF Pro and Times New Roman, are free in every edition; the rest come with Alexandria and show dimmed until then. ABC Areal, first under Modern, is Arial redrawn by Dinamo Typefaces, in Nodes by their permission - its card carries their credit, and the ⓘ beside it says where the face comes from.
• Text size - anywhere from 8 to 72 pt.
• Quote - the passage an empty page shows, a small bit of text waiting where your writing will go. It's never written into the file. The row shows it the way an empty page does - in grey, in your font - with where it comes from, so changing the font or the quote shows you the result right there.
• Appearance - System, Light, or Dark. System follows whatever your Mac is set to.

The quotes are named after the release that brought each one, and new ones are only ever added:

Each one is quoted word for word from its edition, and all of them are in the public domain.

Shortcuts

The Shortcuts tab lists 31 commands and the key behind each. Click a key and press the one you want - if it's taken, Nodes names the command that has it before anything changes. The Format commands and Flow start without a key; this is where to give them one. See keyboard shortcuts.

Agent

The Agent tab runs the background agent. A master card holds the on/off switch and a live status line - working now, paused, all caught up, or off. Until a model is chosen the status reads "needs a model", and a Choose a Model button stands in for the switch - it opens the model catalog. The Generates and Automatic cards appear once a model is selected. While the agent works, a Right Now card narrates the node it's on and the queue behind it. While a node you've just edited waits out its two-hour cool-down, Run now on that card skips the wait.

The Generates card holds one switch per pass - Descriptions, Tags, and Reminders - all on to start. Switching one off stops that kind of generation across your library, in the background and in the Node Inspector alike, and with all three off the status reads "nothing enabled". A pass the selected model can't do is greyed out and the card says so: the Apple Foundation Model writes descriptions and suggests tags, but raises no reminders.

The Automatic card holds the power rules:

• Pause in Low Power Mode - holds the agent's queue while Low Power Mode is on; it resumes when the mode ends.
• Double speed when plugged in - halves the gap between nodes while your Mac is on AC power.
• Agent speed - a slider from a gentle one node every 5 minutes up to a brisk 12 nodes a minute.

The Library card draws one bar over your library showing how much the agent has reviewed, split into reviewed, partly, out of sync, never, and excluded - the nodes you've kept from the agent. Excluded nodes don't count toward the reviewed percentage, and image nodes are left out unless a vision-capable model is selected.

The Model card names the selected model - change drills into the model catalog - and holds the Primary Language picker.

Primary language

Pick the language most of your notes are written in - there are 13 to choose from. Everything the agent writes - suggested tags, descriptions, and reminders - comes out in this language. It starts from your Mac's language, so if you write in something else, set it here.