User's Guide to the The Tycho Preferences Manager

The Tycho preferences manager allows you to set a number of preferences that control fonts, layout, and colors in the Tycho user interface. Note: The preferences manager design and the available preferences are changing very rapidly, so we suggest you do not spend much time setting or adjusting your own preferences at this stage.

To open the preferences manager, choose the "Preferences..." entry from the Help menu on the right-hand side of any Tycho shell or editor. This brings up a window with a stack of buttons: clicking on a button brings up another window that gives you access to a set of preferences values. To change a preference, simply change the text in the corresponding entry box and press the Apply button. Pressing the OK button (or the Return key) applies any changed preferences and closes the window; the Cancel button (Escape key) closes the window without changing any preferences.

If the preference is a font or color, pressing the button will bring up a modal dialog box containing a FontDialog or ColorBrowser selector, which you can use to select a new font or color. After closing the modal dialog box, you still have to press Apply to make you change take effect. (Sorry, we're working on a fix.)

The buttons on the man preferences selection dialog have the same effects on all open preference viewers: Apply applies all changed preferences; OK applies all changed preferences and closes all open preference windows; Cancel closes all open preference windows without changing any preferences.

There is, as yet, no way of saving changed preferences. (Again, we're working on it.) You can, however, customize your Tycho by adding commands to your ~/.Tycho/tychorc.tcl file. For example, to change the font used in text windows, add this line (you can click on the code to execute it now if you want):


preference assign fonts textFont  {Screen 12}
The available preferences are still evolving, so there is no documentation available on what they are. To find out what is available, look at the file $tycho/kernel/Defaults.tcl. To make some common preference changes easier, we have provided two files that you can source: (There's a bug which we haven't fixed yet: the HTML viewer font size doesn't change; new HTML viewer windows will, however, get the correct font size.)

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Last updated: 96/12/03, comments to: johnr@eecs.berkeley.edu