AmigaOS Manual: Workbench Preferences

This chapter explains the Preferences editors found in the Prefs drawer. These editors allow you to customize your Amiga environment by:

• Choosing a keyboard type
• Setting your preferred language
• Changing the Workbench screen display
• Changing the Workbench colors
• Changing the shape of the pointer
• Specifying a printer and setting it up for output
• Setting up a modem for use with the Amiga
• Setting the time and date

This chapter contains the following Preferences editor information:

• Contents of the Prefs drawer
• Editor menus
• Presets drawer
• Descriptions of each Preferences editor

Prefs Drawer

The Prefs drawer contains the icons for the Preferences editors and the Preset drawer. Figure 5-1 illustrates the Preferences editors window.

Preferences Window

The following editors are listed in the order in which they are described in this chapter:

Font	For changing the fonts used in the different areas of the screen.
IControl	For choosing miscellaneous system options, such as the key used for screen drag.
Input	For changing the mouse speeds, key repeat speeds, and selecting keyboard type.
Locale	For selecting the language and locality.
Overscan	For adjusting the size of the display area for text and for graphics.
Palette	For changing the Workbench colors.
Pointer	For changing the size, shape, and color of the mouse pointer and busy pointer.
Printer	For specifying the printer driver that matches your printer and for specifying options, such as paper size and margin width.
PrinterGfx	For setting up your printer to print graphics.
PrinterPS	For controlling output to a PostScript printer.
ScreenMode	For choosing a different monitor display mode.
Serial	For setting the specifications for the serial port, which is used to communicate through modems or networking systems.
Sound	For determining the sound your Amiga produces for its display beep.
Time	For setting the time and date.
WBPattern	For selecting or creating background patterns for the Workbench windows and screen.
Presets	For storing different Preferences editor configurations changed through the Project menu.

Editor Menus and Presets Drawer

With the exception of Time, each editor has three menus: Project, Edit, and Settings. The Project menu lets you save and load Prefs preset files, which allow you to quickly change to different configurations. By default, these files are saved in the Presets drawer (SYS:Prefs/Presets), although they can be saved to any location you specify. If you save icons for the files (by selecting Create Icons?), you can activate the settings by opening the file's icon, rather than opening the actual editor.

When you save settings in the Preferences editors by clicking on the Save button, the system stores those settings in the following location:

SYS:Prefs/ENV-Archive/Sys/editorx.prefs

where SYS: is the name of the volume containing the file and editorx is the name of the specific Preferences editor. The settings saved to the Env-Archive drawer are the ones used when you boot. We recommend when you use the Save As option that you use the path provided or a completely different path than this for storing Preset files.

Project Menu

To Be Continued...