Settings
Settings are how you author and view, not part of what you are designing. They are never
written into the .exw file and never appear in undo. One set covers every design you open,
and it is kept between sessions.
They appear in two places: the quick strip at the top of the left panel, and the Settings window behind its gear.
The quick strip
Grid shows or hides the grid overlay, and Snap turns grid snapping on or off. Both light while they are on.
The gear opens the Settings window, and a second click closes it again.
The Settings window
The Settings window floats over the layout and carries every setting. Close it from the gear or from its own ✕.
Grid
Show grid and Snap to grid are the strip’s two toggles under their full names.
Pitch is a single value in µm doing both jobs: the spacing of the fine grid lines and the lattice a snap rounds to. Every tenth line is drawn brighter, and the drawn lines thin out by tens as you zoom out while the snap keeps the pitch you set. Drag the field to scrub the value or type one and press Enter; it will not go below 1 µm.
The lattice is measured from the world origin rather than from your design. In 3D the grid is drawn on the active layer’s plane, and it moves when the active layer changes.
Viewport
Inactive layer mute sets how far the layers that are not the active one desaturate toward gray, from 0 (every layer at full color) to 1 (inactive layers fully gray). The viewport follows the slider as you drag it. The active layer is always vivid.
Openings chooses how the holes through the chip are drawn — the punches under your world ports and the vias between slabs (Viewport & navigation).
- Narrow is the default: a thin shaft on the bore’s axis. A punch is around a millimetre across and the channel it lands on is a fraction of that, so drawing it at size hides the network you are working on.
- True diameter draws each bore at the size it will be cut. Use it to read clearances — how close a punch comes to a neighbouring feature.
- Hidden draws no bore at all.
The setting changes only what is drawn. The openings themselves are worked out from what you connected, and they are the same at all three.
Updates
Check for a new version at startup is on by default, and the dim line under it states what the check sends: your version and your operating system, nothing else. That request is the only thing Experiware sends anywhere.
The automatic check runs once a launch, in the background, and stays quiet unless there is
something newer — a failed check says nothing, because you did not ask. When it does find a
release, the update banner appears under the menu bar.
Help → Check for Updates… asks on demand, reports either way, and runs even with this
checkbox clear (Menus & files).
Grid snapping
Snapping applies wherever a gesture sets a position: moving a child, placing a point or a component, and each vertex you place while drawing a channel or a region. The position rounds to the nearest grid intersection.
Hold Ctrl to invert the setting for that one gesture — with snapping on it moves freely, with snapping off it snaps.
Preferences that live elsewhere
Two more settings behave exactly like these but sit where they are used: the explode gap, on the Layers section, and the default channel width, in the toolbar’s Draw channel options.
The two panel widths and the section heights you drag to are stored the same way, which is why a layout survives a restart (Window & panels).
The preferences file
Everything on this page is written to settings.json under %APPDATA%\Experiware, and read
back at launch. The write follows the change rather than waiting for you to quit, so a session
that ends badly still leaves your settings behind.
Delete the file to return every setting to its default. A file that is missing, unreadable, or written by a different version is not an error: whatever cannot be read falls back to its default.
See also
- Viewport & navigation — the grid, the two view modes, and what the mute changes.
- Layers — the explode slider and the active layer the grid follows.
- Window & panels — where the quick strip sits in the frame, and the update banner the check raises.
- Menus & files — the Help menu’s on-demand check, and the About box.