Settings, themes and sync

The Settings window

Ctrl+, (Settings…) opens it. A sidebar holds the pages, each with its glyph, in two groups:

There is no OK button: every control applies the moment it changes, and the settings file is written at once.

Search settings at the top filters every row of every page. The page that answers best opens: a row whose title matches beats one whose description does, which beats a keyword, so “proxy” opens Connection. Esc clears a search before it closes the window.

Reset to defaults asks first, then puts every setting on these pages back, the theme included, and re-applies what they drive. Categories and tags, watch folders, feeds, search providers and engine profiles are kept.

The settings file, settings.properties, can also be edited by hand.

Appearance

Settings → General → Appearance:

• Theme: Editora Light, Editora Dark, Nord Light, Nord Dark, Cupertino Light or Cupertino Dark, applied the moment you pick one.
• Row density: Comfortable (two lines per torrent, the default) or Compact.
• Colour rows by state: on by default; off leaves the glyphs and sentences in monochrome.
• Sidebar: Left, Right or Hidden.
• Details pane: Bottom, Right or Collapsed.
• Simple mode: off by default. Leaves the list and the everyday actions; see The transfer list.
• Merge the menu bar into the title bar: off by default and experimental. The window is drawn without a system title bar, with the menus, the title and the window buttons on one row. The platform keeps its own buttons, drag, double-click and edge resize. It applies on restart, and is not offered on macOS, where the menu belongs to the system menu bar.

The interface font is Inter, bundled. View → Toolbar hides the icon toolbar.

Language

Settings → General → Language → Interface language: System (the operating system’s language, or English when that is not one of these), English, Deutsch, Español, Français, Italiano or Português. The choice takes effect after a restart, and it syncs. What libtorrent itself reports stays as it is.

Keyboard

Settings → Keyboard lists every command under its menu with the chord it is on, and changes any of them:

• Click a command’s shortcut and press the new one. A function key works on its own; any other key needs Ctrl, Alt or Cmd, since a bare key belongs to the filter box.
• A shortcut another command has asks you to press it again, then moves it here.
• Backspace leaves a command with none; Reset puts one back on its default, and Reset All Shortcuts every one.
• Commands with no shortcut can be given one, and so can the view digits and the first nine saved views. Select All (Ctrl+A) is the list’s own and cannot be moved.

A change applies at once to the menus, the palette, the toolbar’s tooltips and the view strip, and syncs with the other settings as keys.<command>=Shortcut+Shift+K, where Shortcut is Cmd on a Mac and Ctrl elsewhere. The command palette’s own chord (Alt+X by default) is here too; it used to be under General, and a Ctrl+Shift+P chosen there is kept. See Keyboard.

Tray, badge and file handler

System tray

• Show a tray icon (on by default): Torrenta’s arrow-in-a-tray mark, teal while something downloads, red while a torrent has an error, muted otherwise. Its tooltip and the first line of its menu carry the rates and what the torrents are doing; the menu has Show Torrenta and Quit.
• Closing the window keeps Torrenta in the tray (on by default): closing hides the window and the torrents go on. File → Quit, Ctrl+Q or the tray menu’s Quit ends the program. This applies only once an icon has actually appeared: without one, closing quits, and the status bar says why.

On Linux the icon is a StatusNotifierItem (KDE, or GNOME with the AppIndicator extension; X11 and Wayland alike). Windows and macOS use the system’s own tray; there, turning the icon on takes effect after a restart.

Operating system (both on by default, both this machine’s)

• Register as handler for .torrent files and magnet links: makes Torrenta the default at each start. See Adding torrents.
• Show download activity on the dock icon: the download rate on the macOS dock icon, or the number of downloading torrents on a Linux launcher that reads Unity’s badge (KDE’s task manager, GNOME’s Dash to Dock), cleared when nothing downloads. Windows has no badge for Torrenta’s window.

Removed files

Settings → General → Move removed files to the trash (on by default): Remove with files puts a torrent’s files in the desktop’s trash, where they can be restored from, instead of deleting them for good. See The transfer list.

Updates and diagnostics

Settings → General → Updates → Check for updates: after startup, at most once a day, Torrenta asks GitHub whether there is a newer release and says so in the status bar and the Help menu. Nothing about you or the machine is sent beyond the request itself. Help → Check for Updates asks now; Skip Version keeps one release quiet.

Settings → General → Diagnostics → Show debug log (also View → Debug Log) shows every warning and error logged this session and every uncaught exception, with Copy. The same lines go to torrenta-session.log in the config folder, started afresh each run; the last run’s is kept as torrenta-session.prev.log, so a crash’s record survives the next launch. A line that repeats is written three times, then once at 10, 100, 1,000… copies with the count, and the file starts again past 4 MiB.

Help → Report a Problem… (also a button in the Debug Log window) turns both logs into a bug report with home-folder paths, names, hashes and addresses taken out. See the FAQ.

Settings sync

Settings → Sync keeps the settings file the same on every computer through a Git repository of yours, such as a private one on GitHub. There is no Torrenta account or server.

1. Turn on Keep settings in sync. Until it is on, the rest of the page is disabled; with no URL yet, the cursor goes to the URL field.
2. Paste the repository’s URL and check the branch; Enter (or leaving the field) connects. With the GitHub CLI (gh) installed and signed in, Create on GitHub… (offered while no repository is named) makes a private repository and connects it at once. If the repository already holds settings, Torrenta says how many would come to this machine and asks before connecting. A failed connect leaves the switch on and says why.

Settings are merged one key at a time. A key changed on both sides keeps this machine’s value, and the report says so. Sync runs after startup, half a minute after a change, and every few minutes while the window is in front (Every, in minutes); Sync now runs it at once. Disconnect stops it and removes the local copy, leaving your settings as they are.

It never asks for a password: git signs in the way it does for you, and with two gh accounts, the one that can read the repository is used. Put no password or token in the URL.

What stays on each machine: the download and incomplete folders, the network interface, the local IP filter list, the clocks of the last checks, the proxy password, the per-torrent entries, the sidebar’s choices, the window’s size and place, the run-on-event commands, the New Torrent dialog’s last folder and trackers, a skipped update, the engine profile in use, the desktop handler and badge switches, the alternative speed limits’ on/off switch, everything on the Remote access page, the media player, and the sync connection itself. Everything else in the settings file travels, including the theme, the language, limits, bans, default trackers, your shortcuts and your saved views.

Since 0.3.0 sync also carries:

• Category names and tags. One added on one computer appears on the others, and one deleted is deleted everywhere. Names only: each computer keeps its own folder for a category. The first sync after updating only adds, so nothing that exists on just one computer is lost.
• Search providers, without their API keys: a server that arrives asks for its key once on that computer. Definition files you added or changed travel a file at a time.

The files Torrenta keeps

Everything is in ~/.torrenta, unless moved with --config-dir DIR or TORRENTA_CONFIG_DIR.