Settings

The Settings view holds everything that applies to Grafida as a whole, rather than to one site or one article. Settings are saved the moment you change them; there is no Save button on this page except where one is explicitly shown.

Interface language

The language Grafida's own interface is written in. (Auto-detect) follows your operating system, falling back to English (United Kingdom) when Grafida has no translation for it.

The editor's menus and dialogs follow this setting too, where a translation exists for them.

Grafida ships English (United Kingdom), Greek, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese (Portugal). If yours is missing, or a wording is wrong, see Translation — adding a language needs no code change.

This has nothing to do with the language of the articles you write, which is set per article in the editor's properties sidebar, nor with the spell-check dictionary, which is an operating-system setting.

Display mode

Light, Dark, or Follow system.

The same three choices are available from the switch in the sidebar, so you can change the theme without leaving an open article. See Navigation for what happens to the editor's own content area, which your site's editor.css may override.

Slash commands

Whether typing / in the editor opens the command menu. On by default. Switch it off if you often type slashes in ordinary prose.

Changing this takes effect immediately, even in an editor you already have open.

Spell checking

Whether misspelt words are underlined in the editor, using your operating system's own spell checker. On by default.

Switching it off hides the underlines straight away. Switching it back on only marks text you edit afterwards, not the text already on screen — an inherent limitation of the web view Grafida draws itself with.

Close HTML tags for me

How the source code editor helps you finish HTML tags. There are three choices rather than a simple on/off switch, because the two halves of the feature are genuinely useful apart from each other.

Opening and closing tags (the default) inserts </p> the moment you finish typing <p>.

Closing tags only inserts nothing on its own, but completes a closing tag once you have typed its </. This is the setting for editing existing markup, where tags appearing unbidden get in the way.

Off leaves you to type everything.

The setting is read when the source code editor opens, so it takes effect the next time you open it.

Normalise AI-generated content

Text written or rewritten by an AI almost always carries characters you cannot see. Zero-width spaces and joiners, left-to-right and right-to-left marks, the Unicode tag characters — which can spell out a whole hidden message one code point at a time — variation selectors, soft hyphens and several kinds of unusual space. Some of it is a deliberate watermark. Some of it is simply picked up by copying out of a web page, which does the same thing by accident.

It is worth removing for reasons that have nothing to do with watermarks:

• A screen reader announces what it finds. Invisible characters are read out, or break a word into two, and the article stops making sense to the person listening to it.
• A directional override can reverse the reading order of part of a sentence, showing a reader something different from what you wrote.
• A soft hyphen or a zero-width space inside a word breaks find-in-page and site search for everybody, because the word no longer matches itself.

Grafida strips these characters at every point where text crosses into, or out of, an article:

• replies from the AI assistant, as they are inserted;
• Markdown you import;
• text pasted with Paste as plain text;
• the title, body and metadata of every article you publish.

Your local article is left alone as you work — the clean-up happens on the way out, so what reaches your site is clean whether the text came from Grafida's AI assistant, from an ordinary paste out of some other AI tool, or from an article you imported from the site itself.

Invisible marks and unusual spaces (the default) also collapses no-break, thin, hair, ideographic and similar spaces to an ordinary space.

Invisible marks only leaves every space exactly as you typed it. Choose this if your typography needs those spaces: French punctuation is set with a no-break space before !, ?, : and ;, and Japanese and Chinese text is written with the ideographic space. Neither is a watermark.

Off touches nothing. This is also the honest choice if you write right-to-left text and place directional marks deliberately, because Grafida treats those marks as watermark carriers and removes them.

Characters that carry meaning are always kept, in every mode. The joiners that hold an emoji sequence together (👨‍👩‍👧 is three people and two invisible joiners), the tag characters that spell out a subdivision flag, and the joiners that Persian, Arabic and the Indic scripts need to shape their letters correctly are all left where they are.

Site metadata

Grafida keeps a local copy of each site's categories, tags, access levels, languages and custom fields. That copy is what the editor and the Articles filters are drawn from, which is why the editor opens instantly and works off-line. These two options control how often it is brought up to date.

Cache time is how old the copy may get before Grafida quietly refreshes it in the background, from 15 minutes to a day. Never refresh automatically switches the background refresh off entirely — the Reload metadata buttons on the Sites, Articles and editor screens still work.

Reload on startup discards the local copy every time Grafida starts, so the first site you open is read fresh from the server. It is off by default and should stay that way on a slow or unreliable connection: the first screen that needs the data has to wait for your site to answer, which looks a great deal like Grafida has stopped responding.

Debug

Request log records the last 20 requests Grafida sends to your site, so you can see exactly what was asked and what came back. It is off by default.

Switching it on adds a Request Log item to the sidebar. See Request Log.

The log is kept in memory only: it is cleared when Grafida starts, whenever you switch sites, and whenever you switch this setting off.

Local storage

Shows where Grafida's database file lives on your computer — everything you have: sites, local articles, unpublished pictures, cached site metadata and saved AI chats. Open folder opens its containing folder in your file manager.

The file is worth including in your backups.

Reset local storage

Reset local storage permanently deletes every site, local article, stored API token and cached item from this computer, returning Grafida to a clean, just-installed state.

AI Services and AI Tools

The last two cards configure the optional AI assistant, which is off until you set one up. They have their own pages: Overview, AI Services, AI Tools and Chat.