Settings

Change how Strata looks and behaves from one panel, and keep most settings in one TOML file you can track with your dotfiles.

Open Settings

Press Ctrl+, or click the gear (Settings) in the window header. The panel first opens on General; the other pages are Appearance, Actions, Updates, and About.

Type in Search settings to jump to a row: "font" finds Text size. Escape clears the search; press it again, or click outside the panel, to close Settings.

Find settings.toml

Every preference change is saved at once to ~/.config/strata/settings.toml, or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/strata/settings.toml when you set that variable. A fresh install has no file until your first change.

To edit it by hand, close every Strata window, change values in place (a key written twice makes the file invalid), and reopen Strata:

language = "fr"
date_format = "iso"
show_hidden = true

Keep settings in your dotfiles

Change any setting once so the file exists. Then close Strata, move the file into your repository, and link it back:

mkdir -p ~/dotfiles/strata
mv ~/.config/strata/settings.toml ~/dotfiles/strata/settings.toml
ln -s ~/dotfiles/strata/settings.toml ~/.config/strata/settings.toml

On another machine, close Strata and remove any ~/.config/strata/settings.toml there. Then run mkdir -p ~/.config/strata and the same ln -s line. Strata writes through the link and keeps the file's permissions. The link and the file must both be yours, and the file must exist.

Strata loads the file at startup. Pull dotfiles changes while Strata is closed: a change made in a running Strata saves its own copy of every setting over them.

Link the file, not ~/.config/strata: tabs.toml there changes as you work. Custom themes live in its themes/ folder; link that too. Otherwise a missing custom theme falls back to Azure Glow, and your next change saves that into your dotfiles. Copy custom actions into actions/ rather than linking it: Strata cannot create, edit, import, or toggle an action in a linked actions/.

Settings worth changing

Language

General → Language offers Auto-detect, which follows your system language, and 11 languages listed by their own names, such as Français. Click Restart now to apply the change. Japanese, Korean, and Chinese need a CJK font such as Noto Sans CJK.

In the file, write language = "auto" or a code: en, fr, de, es, it, pt-BR, ru, vi, ja, ko, or zh-CN.

Modified date format

General → Modified date format sets how file times read in lists and previews.

Where new windows open

Under General → Default directory, click Home directory and pick a folder. A new window opens there unless it has a folder to open or tabs to restore; turn off Restore open tabs to always start there. Reset returns to home.

Hidden files

Press Ctrl+H or Ctrl+. to show or hide hidden files in every window. Strata remembers the choice.

Good to know

• A change in one window applies to every open window at once, except Language and Appearance → Interface renderer, which wait for a restart.
• Opening Settings never writes to settings.toml; only a change does.
• A bad value, such as show_hidden = "yes", falls back to its default alone.
• If the file is not valid TOML, Strata starts with defaults and never saves over it. Your first change shows Settings file can't be read. Fix the file and restart Strata.
• If a save fails, Settings can't be saved appears. Changes last until Strata closes; each new change retries the save.

Full detail: the Themes reference covers Appearance; Browser tabs covers Restore open tabs.