# Settings

This chapter describes the various settings that affect the way &krita; functions and looks.

## The Preferences dialog

A number of options to configure &krita; are available via the Preferences dialog, which is available via Settings Configure &krita;.... The dialog is divided into several sections, which you can open via the sidebar at the left, shown below.

The available Preferences sections The available Preferences sections

The available Preferences sections

### The General section

The General section The General section

The General section

This section offers three options. First of all, the setting in the Cursor shape dropdown box determines what the drawing cursor looks like. You can choose between a cursor resembling the actual tool you are working with, a normal cursor, a crosshair, and a brush-shaped cursor. Then you can select the Palette Behavior. You can set here when palettes may be docked (set aside at a window border): always (Allow docking), never (Allow only floating), or when there is enough space (Allow docking only on large screens). The last option is Palette font size which determines the text size used in the palettes. Set this to a larger value if you have trouble reading the text, with the side effect that the palettes will take more space.

### The Display section

The Display section The Display section

The Display section

This section contains just one option. If your graphics card and driver have OpenGL support, you can enable it here to make drawing faster (the processor of your graphics card will take over part of the calculations). Be warned, though: there are a few cases where enabling OpenGL is known to introduce erratic behavior.

### The Color Management section

The Color Management section The Color Management section

The Color Management section

Here you can set various options related to colorspaces in rendering, editing and printing of images. The topmost option can be used to set the default color model for creating new images (useful if you usually want to create CMYK images, for instance). Use the Display options to let &krita; know what color profile your monitor uses, and how rendering should be done. Under Printing, you can set the color model and profile for your printer. The next option determines what &krita; should do when you paste an image into it that was copied from another application. If Use Blackpoint compensation is checked, whenever a colorspace conversion is needed, the black points of the source and destination colorspaces are matched.

### The Performance section

The Performance section The Performance section

The Performance section

Two options are available here. The Maximum number of tiles kept in memory setting indicates how many tiles (image subparts) &krita; will keep in memory. The default setting should be reasonable, if you are low or very high on memory, you may want to decrease or increase this option, respectively. The Swappiness option determines how eager &krita; will be to swap to disk.

### The Tablet section

The Tablet section The Tablet section

The Tablet section

If you have a tablet device attached, you can enable it and set its pressure sensitivity in this section.

You need to activate the tablet devices you want to use with &krita;. There are three supported devices: the cursor, the eraser and the stylus. You can activate them using the tablet sections. Only use the configuration options of a device if you use a non-Wacom tablet, and if the behavior of the tablet is unexpected, like moving when you press on the tablet for instance. In this situation, you can use the dialog to make sure you have a correct interaction: values (position, pressure, tilt...) are sent from the tablet to the computer in a given order, it might happen that some tablets do not use the default order. You can set this in the configuration options of a device.

### The Grid section

The Grid section The Grid section

The Grid section

In this section, you can fine-tune &krita;'s grid. The line styles for the grid can be set in the Styles option set. Colors allows you to choose the line colors for the grid. The horizontal and vertical spacing between the main lines can be set under Spacing, as well as the amount of subdivisions (in how many smaller parts a grid section is subdivided). Furthermore you can set the Offset: usually the grid is painted starting at the top left corner, if you want the first main grid lines not to start there, you can enter an offset (displacement) here.