leaftext saves your preferences locally — no account, no cloud sync. Settings are stored as JSON files in the OS-standard config directory and loaded on each launch. The WebView shell’s opaque origin makes localStorage non-durable across restarts, so the Rust host owns all persistence and injects the saved values as a window.__leafSettings global before any page script runs.
Opening Settings
Click Settings in the app bar (the sliders icon, top right). The panel opens as a dropdown below the icon. Press Escape or click anywhere outside the panel to close it. Every change takes effect immediately.
Available settings
| Setting | Options | Default | Description |
|---|
| Theme | System, Light, Dark, Dracula | System | Visual color scheme. System follows the OS light/dark preference automatically. |
| Language | System, English, 简体中文 | System | UI language. System resolves zh* OS locales to Simplified Chinese; all other locales fall back to English. |
| Minimap | On / Off | On | Show or hide the document minimap side rail. Off switches the reader to a centred single-column layout. |
| Indexing | On / Off | Off | Enable or disable background Markdown file crawl across the device. Manually opened files are always added to the library regardless of this setting. |
| Library view | Project, Tree, Flat | Project | Which layout the library pane uses. Project drills into folders one level at a time; Tree shows an expandable hierarchy; Flat lists all indexed files alphabetically. |
Storage locations
All storage is local to your machine and follows the OS standard directories.
| File | Purpose |
|---|
{config_dir}/leaftext/settings.json | Theme, language, minimap visibility, library layout, indexing toggle |
{config_dir}/leaftext/recent-files.json | Last 8 opened file paths |
{local_data_dir}/leaftext/manifest.db | Library index (SQLite) |
%LOCALAPPDATA%\ryanallen\leaftext\data\webview2 | WebView2 browser data (Windows only) |
{
"indexing_enabled": true,
"minimap_enabled": true,
"theme_mode": "system",
"library_view": "tree",
"library_expanded": [],
"library_project_path": "",
"library_closed": false,
"library_width": 260
}
#[serde(default)] on the Settings struct, so any field that is missing when the file is read (for example, after an upgrade adds a new preference) falls back to its default value rather than failing to load.
Recent files
The last 8 opened files are shown on the no-file home screen so you can reopen them with a single click. They are stored in recent-files.json as a JSON array of absolute paths:
{
"files": [
"/Users/alice/projects/api/README.md",
"/Users/alice/notes/daily.md"
]
}
app/README.md and app/.tmp/../README.md) are collapsed to one, preserving the most recently seen spelling.
Localization
The language setting controls all UI copy: button labels, settings descriptions, empty-state text, and aria labels. The app ships English and Simplified Chinese; both translation dictionaries are embedded in the WebView shell and applied without a network request.
System language mode uses navigator.languages to detect the OS locale at runtime. Locales starting with zh resolve to Simplified Chinese (zh-CN); all other locales fall back to English. The selection is applied immediately without restart — a locale subscription in the app shell re-renders all static text and the current document state as soon as the mode changes.
On macOS, config_dir is ~/Library/Application Support. On Windows it is %APPDATA%. On Linux it follows the XDG base directory spec ($XDG_CONFIG_HOME, defaulting to ~/.config). local_data_dir on Windows is %LOCALAPPDATA%; on macOS it is the same as config_dir; on Linux it follows $XDG_DATA_HOME (defaulting to ~/.local/share).