Preferences

Open Preferences with ⌘, or from the File menu.

Display

• Show labels under toolbar icons
• Show line numbers — toggleable gutter, wrap-aware
• Show status bar — bottom bar with language, cursor position, encoding, line ending, file size, and modified state (see below)
• Word wrap

Each of these is also available as a checkbox in the View menu, and they’re the same underlying setting either way.

Syntax highlighting

A toggle to turn highlighting on or off entirely. When large files feel sluggish to type in or scroll through, this trades color for speed — see Syntax Highlighting for why the first highlight pass of a large file has a real cost.

Appearance

• Appearance: Light, Dark, or System (default). System follows your macOS appearance setting live, including switching automatically if you change it while Nib is open.
• Dark theme / Light theme: pick which of the seven bundled syntax color themes is used for each mode — see Syntax Highlighting.

Fonts

• Font: choose from monospace fonts already installed on your Mac, or “App Default”
• Font size: the app-wide default size (−/+ buttons). Individual tabs can be zoomed independently without changing this default — see Editing & Navigation.

Install ’nib’ command in PATH

A button that symlinks Nib into your shell PATH (VS Code-style), so you can run nib somefile.txt from a terminal — see Command Line. If it can’t get the necessary permission automatically, it offers a ready-to-paste manual command that doesn’t need admin access instead.

Window behavior

Window position and size are remembered automatically across restarts — no separate setting, it just happens.

Status bar fields

When shown, the status bar displays (left to right): detected language and total line count, then cursor line/column, character encoding, line ending style, file size, and whether the tab has unsaved changes.