Chapter 15

Preferences and your data

This chapter covers every setting in Preferences, how Andon protects your data, and what to do when something goes wrong.

Open Preferences

Click the gear button in the toolbar. The window has two tabs: Preferences and Libraries. Click Save to apply your changes or Cancel to leave them. Saving takes you back to the project list.

Settings

Setting	Choices	Notes
Language	English, Français	The interface switches as soon as you save; plugin tabs switch fully at the next launch
Theme	Dark, Nord, Solarized Dark, Dracula, Light, Paper, Nord Light, Solarized Light, Alucard	Applies at once, including to the note editor, code blocks and the draw.io editor
Spell-check	Off (default), On	The default for notes; each note's toolbar can switch it for that note
Updates	Check for Updates	Opens the update window (see chapter 2)
Plugins	Manage Plugins	Opens the Plugin Manager (see chapter 14)

Themes

Andon has four dark themes and five light ones.

Dark: the default, easy on the eyes for long sessions.
Nord, Solarized Dark, Dracula: popular dark palettes, if you already use them in your code editor.
Light: neutral white and grey with a blue accent, for bright rooms.
Paper: the same layout in warm, off-white tones.
Nord Light, Solarized Light, Alucard: the light companions of Nord, Solarized and Dracula. Alucard is Dracula's own light theme.

In the light themes, panels, buttons, fields and project cards have thin borders and soft shadows, task rows are separated by a fine line, and white (Initialized) shows as an empty ring rather than a grey dot. The four status colors stay recognizable in every theme.

The Libraries tab

This tab lists the open-source libraries Andon is built on, each with a short description and a link, plus a link to Andon's own source code on Codeberg.

What Andon remembers for you

Without any setting, Andon remembers:

your window size
the project, task and tab you were last using
while Andon stays open, the last task and tab you used in each project
your project sort order and each project's task sort

The auto-save delay (about three seconds) and the history retention rules (see chapter 8) are fixed and do not appear in Preferences.

How your data is protected

Andon guards your data in three ways:

Automatic saving. Notes save themselves a few seconds after you stop typing, and every change to tasks and projects is saved immediately.
Backups before updates. The first time a new version starts, Andon copies its databases into the backups folder before changing anything, keeping the three most recent copies.
Recovery after a failed start. If Andon fails to start, the next launch opens a recovery window instead of the normal one.

Your own backups

Close Andon and copy the whole data folder somewhere safe. To restore, close Andon and copy the folder back.

The recovery window

The recovery window shows a summary of the error and lists the available backups by version and date. You can:

select a backup and click Restore selected. Andon restores it and restarts.
click Start anyway to try a normal start without restoring anything.

If no backup is listed, you can start anyway or reinstall a previous version.

Moving to a new computer

On the old computer, close Andon and copy the whole Andon data folder (see chapter 2 for its location).
On the new computer, install Andon, start it once, then close it.
Replace the new Andon data folder with your copy.
Start Andon. Your projects, archive, notes, history, attachments and settings are all there.

Installed plugins live in the same folder, so they move with it.

Reporting a problem

Andon writes errors to crash.log in its data folder. When reporting a problem, include that file, your Andon version (shown in Preferences) and the steps that led to the problem.