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Preferences

General & Appearance

Opening Preferences, and the General page: language, theme, font size and hints.

KafkIO's preferences are app-wide settings that apply to every cluster, as opposed to the per-cluster settings in the cluster dialog. This page shows how to open them and covers the General page: language, light or dark theme, font size and hints.

Opening Preferences

Choose File ▸ Preferences. The KafkIO Preferences window lists its pages on the left (General, Network, Kafka and Kerberos) and opens on General.

The KafkIO Preferences window with General selected in the list on the left (General, Network, Kafka, Kerberos), a Search box above the list and five icon buttons below it. The General page has an Appearance section with Language set to English, Visual theme set to Dark, and an unticked Override default font settings box next to a greyed-out Size of 9, then a User interface section with Show hints (i.e. helpful tooltips, suggestions and explanations) ticked. Save and Cancel are at the bottom right. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
The General page of KafkIO Preferences, with its default settings.
  1. The page list. The other pages have their own docs: Network, Proxy & Trust, Kafka & Timeouts and Kerberos.
  2. Language.
  3. Visual theme: Dark or Light.
  4. Override default font settings unlocks the size next to it.
  5. The font Size, in points.
  6. Show hints.
  7. Save stores the changes on every page and closes the window.

Changes take effect only when you click Save, which stores the settings of all four pages at once; KafkIO confirms with a Preferences recorded notification. Cancel (or Esc) throws away everything you changed since opening the window. If a value is invalid, Save shows an error naming the page and setting, and the window stays open so you can fix it.

The Search... box above the list, and the buttons below it (import, export, show and reset preferences, and Memory Stick mode), work across all pages: see Managing Preferences and Memory Stick Mode.

Language

KafkIO is currently available in English only, so Language offers just English. Changing the language, once others are available, needs a restart: KafkIO says so in a Restart required message after you save.

Visual theme

Visual theme switches KafkIO between Dark (the default) and Light. The main window changes as soon as you click Save; there's no need to restart or reconnect, and open tabs, search results and connections are kept.

The KafkIO main window in the light theme: white backgrounds with dark text. The Kafka Clusters list shows Storefront Dev (green) and Storefront Prod (eu-w..., red), both connected and expanded. Two tabs are open, Storefront Dev and its duplicate Storefront Dev (Consumers). The Storefront Dev tab shows the orders topic's Messages tab with the search form, a table of JSON messages with one row selected in orange, and the selected message formatted as JSON below. The topics list on the right shows __consumer_offsets, audit-log, orders and payments.
The same workspace in the Light theme. Selections, the active section and accents stay orange in both themes.

Cluster colours (on each cluster's icon, its tabs and the status bar) don't change with the theme, so a colour that stands out in one theme can be hard to see in the other: very dark colours disappear in the dark theme and very light ones in the light theme. If you switch, check your clusters' colours still read well (see General Connection Settings).

Font size

KafkIO uses a 9-point font throughout. To make everything larger, tick Override default font settings and set Size (in points), then Save. The main window updates straight away. Of the dialogs, only the cluster dialog, the Event Log and Preferences itself follow it; the others (confirmations, error messages, Create Topic and so on) keep the standard size. The smallest size is 9; anything lower is refused with You must enter an integer value higher than 8.

A larger font needs more room: at 12 points in a 1520×960 window, for example, the table columns and the message detail bar start cutting labels short. Enlarge the window or narrow the side panes to compensate. Unticking the box goes back to the default size; the number you typed is remembered for next time.

Tip: to fit more rows into the tables without changing the font, use View ▸ Compact Tables instead (see The KafkIO Workspace).

Hints

Show hints (i.e. helpful tooltips, suggestions and explanations), under User interface, is on by default. It controls the small information icons next to fields and column headers (click one for a short explanation of the setting or figure), and the tips shown in some dialogs, such as the notes on the Schema Registry, Kafka Connect and ksqlDB tabs of the cluster dialog.

The search form of a topic's Messages tab in the dark theme, with hints on. Small circled question-mark icons sit to the right of Search type, Partition(s), Max page/poll size, Key deserializer, Key/message trim, Text filter and Value deserializer. 1 2
Information icons on the Messages search form, with hints on.
  1. The information icon for Search type: it explains each search type.
  2. The one for Key deserializer lists the built-in deserializers.

Once you know your way around, untick the box to declutter the screens. The change applies when you save, without a restart: in the search form above, the icons by Search type, Partition(s), the deserializers and Text filter disappear, as does the one on the topics list's # Msgs column. A few icons stay (Max page/poll size and Key/message trim, for example), and so do the tooltips that appear when you hover over a button, despite what the label says.