Settings

Open Settings with ⌘, on macOS or Ctrl+, on Windows and Linux. Changes apply at once; there is no Save button.

Reset appearance, at the top of the page, puts the Appearance settings other than the colorway, and the Code, Grid and Behavior settings, back to their defaults. Everything else stays as it is: the colorway, Safety, Stages, Checkpoints, AI Assistant, Agents, Updates and your keys.

Each entry below is the setting’s label and the explanation the app shows beside it, read from the app itself. Keyboard has its own page, Keyboard shortcuts, and the Agents section is described in Connect an agent.

Appearance

Quiet highlighting: Keywords, functions and types sit nearer the text color; strings, numbers and comments keep theirs.
Interface text: Scales labels, lists and panels together.

Code

Font: Used in the editor and the result grid. Falls back to Plex Mono when a font is not installed.
Size: 11 to 18 px, separate from the interface text.
Ligatures: Lets a font join sequences such as <> and != in the editor.
Wrap long lines: Long statements wrap in the editor instead of scrolling sideways.
Run with nothing selected: ⌘↵ and Run take the statement at the cursor, or the whole script. ⌘⇧↵ always runs the whole script.
Keyword case: How completion writes keywords such as select and from.
Tables completion offers: The schemas on the search path, those and the system’s, or every schema. Tables off the path are written with their schema.

Grid

Row density: How much room each result row gets.
Column headers in Structure: Labels the columns of each table on a table's Structure tab. The tab has the same switch.

Behavior

Rows per page: How many rows a query or a table fetches at a time.

Safety

Rules for: Production's rules can only be made stricter. Read-only and the time limits apply when a connection opens; the questions apply from the next statement.
Open read-only: No writes until you unlock, for each launch. Applies to connections opened from now on.
Stop statements after: A profile can set a shorter limit of its own.
Give up waiting for a lock after: A statement stops instead of queueing behind another session's lock.
Ask before: destructive statements: DROP, TRUNCATE, an UPDATE or DELETE with no WHERE, deleted rows and dropped structure.
Ask before: structure changes: CREATE, ALTER, COMMENT and GRANT.
Ask before: every write: Any INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE or edited row.
Ask before: code that cannot be read: A DO block, CALL or EXECUTE, whose effect is not in its text.
Ask before: scripts that cannot be parsed: When the parser cannot read a script, nothing about it is known.
Ask before large results: A query with no LIMIT the planner expects to return more rows than this.
Warn about a transaction open for: A query tab's transaction open this long holds its locks: the status bar says so, and a toast offers Commit, Roll back or Keep open. Nothing ends it on its own.
Lock again after an unlock: An unlocked read-only connection locks again after this long, once no transaction is open.

Stages

Sketch: A database in Sketch holds nothing of anyone's yet. It leaves on its own once rows Alcuin did not seed or another application appear; Sketch this database brings an empty one back.

Checkpoints

Automatic checkpoints kept: On local and dev databases Alcuin takes a checkpoint after creating one, after its first tables, and before a change only a checkpoint can undo. Past this many, the oldest goes. Checkpoints you name are kept until you delete them.

AI Assistant

Assistant: Off until you turn it on. It sends what you ask about to the provider below, only when you ask; PRIVACY.md lists exactly what.
Provider: Anthropic's API, or any server that speaks OpenAI's chat completions: LM Studio, LiteLLM, Ollama.
Address: The only address the assistant calls. Changing it withholds the saved key until you enter it again. You allowed this address in Alcuin’s dialog.
API key: A key is saved for this address.
Model: claude-sonnet-5-5 unless you choose another.
Name history and saved queries: When the History panel opens, unnamed entries in view are named in one request, from the SQL history keeps. Saving a query asks for a name.
Test connection: Sends one short message to the address above, once you allow it.

Updates

Receive pre-release builds: Releases are pre-releases for now. Off means full releases only, and there are none yet.