Preferences, tab by tab.

General

Open with Cmd+,. The General tab covers app-wide behaviour:

• Show hidden files — toggled per-pane with Cmd+.
• Confirm before deleting files, Confirm before copying files, Confirm before moving files — three separate toggles, all on by default. Uncheck any one to skip its confirmation prompt. Even with the delete toggle off, a permanent delete — on a network share or a volume with no Trash — always asks first.
• Sync terminal & pane paths — cd in the shell follows the pane and vice versa.
• Open at login — for people who use it as their finder.
• Restore tabs on relaunch — your local-pane tabs come back exactly where you left them.
• Strict SSH host-key checking — off (default) trusts a host’s key on first connect; on rejects unknown hosts outright.
• Show debug overlay — floating FPS / memory / I/O panel.
• Per-tab terminal sessions — on by default. Off makes every tab share one shell.
• Calculate folder sizes — Off / On hover / Always. “On hover” is the sweet spot.
• Throttle local copies to — cap the bytes-per-second rate on F5/F6 copies (Unlimited / 1 / 5 / 10 / 50 / 100 / 250 MB/s).
• Sorting folders — a three-way choice. Keep on top (default, classic orthodox behaviour), Mix with files — a sort by, say, Date Modified interleaves folders and files by the sort key — or Keep at bottom: files first, folders grouped below, PathFinder-style. Whichever you pick, each pane remembers its sort column and direction across relaunches.
• Enable type-ahead search — on by default. Type a letter to jump to the matching file. Turn it off to free single letters for custom shortcuts (e.g. Vim verbs like y/p/dd in the Vim preset).

The same tab also hosts the Admin Mode controls (master switch, “always use admin for this session”, Reveal Audit Log, Verify Chain) and a link to open the system Keyboard preferences for F-key behaviour. A Drop Admin after popup decides how long Admin mode stays armed once granted — 1, 5, 10 (default), or 30 minutes of inactivity, or Never — so elevated privileges quietly expire when you stop using them.

Appearance

Five built-in themes:

• Modern — follows the system (light or dark).
• Paper — light, off-white, stays light even when macOS goes dark.
• Bridge — the deep-navy look of this very website: dark blue panes, blue and purple accents, amber folder markers, and JetBrains Mono — the typeface ships inside the app, so it looks right on every Mac.
• Norton Commander — blue + cyan, optional CRT scanlines and phosphor glow.
• Midnight Commander — dark blue + grey.

Drop your own JSON file into ~/Library/Application Support/CaptainsDeck/Themes/ and click Reload — the new theme appears in the dropdown immediately. Themes Folder… opens that directory in Finder.

Below the theme picker sits an Appearance popup — Match System, Light, or Dark. It pins the app’s light/dark mode independent of System Settings, so you can run Captain’s Deck dark while the rest of your Mac stays light. It applies to system-following themes like Modern; themes with a fixed palette (Paper, Bridge, Norton, Midnight) keep their own appearance, as they should.

Same tab covers split orientation, list font, font size, and row height.

The Active Pane Border row styles the outline that marks the focused pane: a width popup (Hidden, or 1–4 px — 2 px is the default), a color well for any color you like, and a Theme Color button that snaps the color back to the current theme’s accent. Changes repaint live, and they apply to the sidebar and terminal focus borders too.

Terminal appearance

The embedded terminal’s look lives here too:

• Color scheme — a popup of built-ins: Classic Green, Solarized Dark, Nord, Dracula, and Tomorrow Night.
• Cursor style — Block, Underline, or Bar (I-beam).
• Blink cursor — a checkbox to make the cursor pulse.
• Terminal font — pick the monospace family for the shell.
• Import from Terminal… — load a macOS .terminal profile to reuse the colors you already use in Terminal.app.

Changes apply to any open terminals right away. See the terminal guide for the shell itself.

Sidebar

The Sidebar tab controls what appears in the left-hand rail. Its five sections — Devices, Bookmarks, Recent Folders, Tags, and Saved Searches — each have a checkbox: tick to show, untick to hide.

Select a section and use Move Up / Move Down to reorder them. The sidebar’s width is remembered across launches.

Keyboard

Pick a layout preset, then customise individual actions on top:

• Orthodox — the default. Vim hjkl + arrow keys + F2/F3/F4/F5/F6/F7/F8 for rename/view/edit/copy/move/mkdir/delete.
• macOS — arrows only (no hjkl), Cmd+Up/Down for top/bottom, Cmd+C/V/X for clipboard, Cmd+Delete to delete, Cmd+N to mkdir.
• Vim — everything Orthodox plus single-key Vim verbs: y for copy, p for paste, dd to delete, : opens Go to Path.

Switching presets prompts you first — it overrides any per-action customisations you’ve already saved. Custom bindings persist across launches.

To rebind a single action, select it in the list, then:

• Record — replace its shortcut with the keys you press.
• Add — give the action a second (or third) shortcut, keeping the existing ones, so it answers to more than one key.
• Remove… — drop one of an action’s shortcuts when it has several (for example, take Backspace off “Go to Parent” so you can use it elsewhere).

External Tools (F4 editor)

Configure the editor F4 launches. Captain’s Deck auto-detects what’s installed and lets you point at any binary by path. The default fires for everything; mark a tool as default and add file extensions to its list to override per type — e.g. .md goes to iA Writer, everything else falls back to Zed.

Terminal

The terminal’s look — color scheme, cursor style, blink, font, and Import from Terminal… — lives under Appearance (see above). Its behaviour is governed by a couple of toggles on the General tab:

• Sync terminal & pane paths — auto-cd on navigation, on by default. Suppressed while a foreground command is running so it doesn’t clobber your stdin.
• Per-tab terminal sessions — each pane tab gets its own shell. Switch tabs, the terminal swaps with you. Close a tab, its shell goes away.

Captain’s Deck reads $SHELL (zsh by default on modern macOS); your existing .zshrc / .bashrc / fish config loads as a normal interactive login shell.

Advanced

Some preferences live as defaults commands rather than checkboxes — either because they’re narrow tweaks or because the UI hasn’t caught up yet.

• Per-host FTP filename encoding — defaults write com.captainsdeck.app ftpFilenameEncoding -dict-add ftp.example.com latin1. See the FTP guide.
• Plain-FTP credential allow-list — defaults write com.captainsdeck.app ftpAllowCredentialUploads -array-add 'ftp.example.com' for hosts where you accept the risk.
• Live directory refresh — local panes watch the visible folder and refresh the instant something changes. On by default; defaults write com.captainsdeck.app liveRefreshEnabled -bool NO switches the watcher off if you’d rather refresh manually.
• Diagnostic logging — on by default, low volume, capped at 1 MB: file-operation diagnostics land in ~/Library/Logs/CaptainsDeck/diagnostic.log so a hard-to-reproduce failure can be sent in without flipping a switch first. defaults write com.captainsdeck.app diagnosticLoggingEnabled -bool NO turns it off.