Preferences
App-wide settings — interface scale, plugins, keyboard shortcuts, and which projects you trust.
Preferences live in their own window and apply everywhere in DNA, not to a single project. Pick a category on the left; its settings fill the pane on the right. Changes save the moment you make them.
Appearance
The first stop is Interface Scale — one slider that grows or shrinks every part of the UI at once. Drag it anywhere from 50% to 200%, or tap a preset (100%, 125%, 150%, 200%). It's the quickest fix when DNA feels too small on a high-DPI display or too large on a laptop.
If panels and text feel cramped, nudge UI Scale up a notch before reaching for anything else. It rescales the whole interface cleanly.
Theme customization is listed here too, but it's still on the way.
Theme colours are planned — the Appearance pane currently shows a "coming soon" placeholder for them.
Plugins
This is where you tell DNA which folders to scan for plugins at startup, and where you see what loaded.
The default plugin folder (~/.dna/plugins/) is always scanned. Use Add Directory… to point DNA at extra folders, and Remove to drop one from the list.
Below that, Installed Plugins lists everything that loaded, each with a small badge for what kind it is (Rust, Native, Shader, or Python), its version, and how many nodes and panels it adds. Plugins that failed to load show up too, with the error spelled out so you know what to fix.
Plugins run real code on your machine. DNA automatically refuses to add a folder that was downloaded from the internet (it carries a "quarantine" mark) — move or un-quarantine the folder first if you trust it. See Trust & Permissions for the full picture.
Keyboard Shortcuts
The shortcuts editor lists every command, grouped by category, with its current key combination beside it.
To rebind one, click its shortcut, type the new combination (for example cmd-shift-k), and press Enter. While editing you can Cancel, Unbind a command so no key triggers it, or Reset a single command to its default. Reset All at the top restores every default at once.
DNA checks for clashes as you type — if the combination is already taken, it tells you which command owns it and won't overwrite it until you choose something free.
Rebound a few too many things? Reset All is a clean slate — it only clears your shortcut overrides, nothing else.
Security & Trust
Trusted Projects lists the .dna files you've granted elevated access to (the kind that can run code or reach outside the project). Each entry has a Revoke button.
Revoking takes effect the next time you open that project — a project that's already open keeps the trust level it was given for this session. To trust a new project, open it and use the Trust this project button in its warning bar rather than adding it here.
The deeper story on what trust grants and why DNA asks lives in Trust & Permissions.
Coming soon
A few categories appear in the sidebar but aren't filled in yet:
Editor — general editing behaviour and defaults
Node Graph — graph display and interaction
Timeline — timeline and animation settings
Performance — rendering and performance options
These show a "coming soon" placeholder for now. The settings they'll hold mostly live elsewhere today — for example viewport and graph display options in Viewport tools and the The performance panel.
Where preferences are stored
Your preferences are saved automatically to a single file in your operating system's app-config folder (separate from any project). DNA writes it safely — a crash mid-save leaves your previous settings intact — and if the file is ever damaged it's set aside with a .bad-… name and reset to defaults rather than blocking startup.