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 delete — the friend who saves you from yourself.
• 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).

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.

Appearance

Four built-in themes:

• Modern — follows the system (light or dark).
• Paper — light, off-white, stays light even when macOS goes dark.
• 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.

Same tab covers split orientation, list font, font size, row height, and (if the build supports it) the embedded terminal’s font.

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.

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 embedded terminal is configured from General rather than its own tab. The toggles that matter:

• 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.

• Active-pane border colour — defaults write com.captainsdeck.app activePaneBorderColor "#FF6B35" (and activePaneBorderWidth for thickness; 0 hides it).
• 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.
• Admin auto-exit timeout — defaults write com.captainsdeck.app adminAutoExitSeconds -int 600 (default 600s; set 0 to disable).