Selecting the Preferences category on the ribbon allows you to set a few options of Msc-generator.

In the first category you can specify what is the chart that pops up when a new chart is started. Just press the button and the current text will become the default. You can place your frequently used constructs here to be readily available when you start a new chart; or just delete everything here to start real empty.

Under ‘Options’ you can set a few compilation options. When pedantic is set Msc-generator generates a warning if an entity is not declared explicitly before use. Turning the second option on will supress the generation of warning messages altogether (including the ones generated due to the pedantic option). ‘Show Page breaks’ governs if a dashed line is drawn to show where page breaks are when watching all of the pages. See Multiple Pages for more information.

In the ‘Color Syntax Highlighting’ panel you can select if you want to use color syntax highlighting in the built-in editor and if yes, which color scheme. There are four pre-defined schemes: Minimal, Standard, Colorful and Error oriented. The first three applies increasing amount of color, while the last is a minimalist scheme but with potential errors heavily highlighted^[9]. At the moment you can not customize individual colors in the schemes.

If the ‘TAB key indents’ check box is checked pressing the TAB key will automatically indent the current line instead of inserting a TAB character.

In the right column of checkboxes you can control smart label indenting (Smart Indent) and wether you want to see errors as you type underined and/or in the error window, Color Syntax Highlighting.

In the ‘Auto Comletion’ panel you can govern, if the system provides language auto-completion (using Ctrl+Space) and Hints. Using the to checkbox you can turn Hints and auto-completion completely off (not even Ctrl+Space works). The two bottom checkboxes govern if the list of hints is grouped along dots (to reduce the length of the list) and if hints that are not matching what you have typed so far shall be removed or not. If grouping is on, attributes starting with the same text, such as line.color and line.width appear as a combined entry as line.*. Pressing the dot ‘.’ key will automatically auto-complete the common part. If filtering is turned on, only those hints are displayed which begin the same as the word under the cursor. If you continue typing, the list is narrowed by every character. If filtering is off all values valid at the location of the cursor are shown. Msc-generator can provide you hints even without pressing the Ctrl-Space. In the subsequent panel you can govern in what language contexts do you want to receive such automatic hints. In general it is best to experiment with these settings and see what you like.

On the last panel you can specify which external text editor to use. You can select any editor using the first option. In this case you have to give a command-line to start the editor and one to invoke to jump to a certain line by pressing the button to the right. The latter can be omitted if the editor does not provide a command line option to jump to a certain location in an existing editor window. Use ‘%n’ for the filename and ‘%l’ for the line number; these will be replaced to the actual filename and linenumber at invocation.