Settings glossary
The Settings sidebar is defined in Settings.svelte. Sections below follow that order: LLM, Hardware, Appearance, Security, Privacy, Data, Wikipedia, File Scanner, Keybinds, Help, and Developer (dev builds only).
For vault encryption and the audit log in depth, see Privacy & security.
LLM
Purpose: Everything that talks to local Ollama on http://localhost:11434 — chat model, embedding model, inference parameters, and full re-index after embedding changes.
Important controls:
- Chat model — Used for chat and note “improve” flows. Can pull missing models through Ollama; you can also type a custom model id.
- Keep model in memory — Maps to Ollama
keep_aliveso the model stays resident; faster follow-up, higher baseline RAM (on the order of several GB for large models). - Embedding model — Drives semantic search and RAG. Changing it invalidates the current vector index; the UI walks you through clear + re-index (and notes that Wikipedia and file-scanner indexes were cleared — refresh those from their own settings when needed).
- Background retries — How many times transient embedding / vector-store failures retry for note re-index, Wikipedia, and file scanner (0–10).
- Inference parameters — Temperature, verbosity, top_p, top_k, repeat penalty, context window — forwarded to Ollama on each request.
Side effects: Pulling models uses disk and network via Ollama’s registry. Re-index uses CPU/GPU and Ollama heavily; expect fans and time on large vaults.
Hardware
Purpose: A read-only dashboard of CPU, RAM, GPUs, and what Ollama has loaded, plus Grimoire’s assessment of whether your machine is rated for full LLM use vs embedding-only.
Important controls:
- Force enable LLM features — Appears when the app thinks hardware is below the “full” threshold. Lets you override the check; performance may suffer.
Side effects: None by itself — informational, with an optional override flag stored in settings.
Appearance
Purpose: Theme, accent, and calendar date display format.
Important controls:
- Theme — System, Light, Dark, Spellbook, Matrix, and a black-and-grey palette path (see in-app labels).
- Accent — Some themes fix accent colours (Spellbook / Matrix); others let you pick swatches.
- Date format — Affects how dates display in the calendar; daily note titles stay on the app’s ISO-style storage convention per Settings copy.
Side effects: Cosmetic only.
Security
Purpose: Vault password, per-folder passwords, and lock / unlock of encrypted content.
Important controls:
- Set / change / remove vault password — Whole-vault encryption at rest (AES-GCM with Argon2id key derivation). The password is not stored; loss means data is not recoverable.
- Per-folder passwords — Optional extra encrypted scope inside the vault.
- Lock vault now — Immediately locks (when a vault password exists).
Side effects: Locking hides locked content from normal browsing and from flows like bulk export until you unlock again. See Privacy & security.
Privacy
Purpose: Local-only guarantees, audit log master switch, file-access logging, retention, and the audit log viewer / export UI.
Important controls:
- Enable audit log — When on, privacy-sensitive actions are recorded locally only (never transmitted). See Privacy & security for event types.
- Log file access — Adds file-scanner reads to the audit log when both this and the audit log are enabled.
- Retention (days) —
0means keep forever; a positive value prunes older rows on startup and via Prune now.
Side effects: Pruning deletes rows permanently. Export respects current filters; rows tied to locked-folder notes may be skipped on export (see privacy page).
Data
Purpose: Bulk export of your vault as Markdown.
Important controls:
- Export notes to Markdown — Choose a destination folder; unlocked notes export with folder structure preserved.
Side effects: Locked notes are skipped in bulk export (per in-app copy in SettingsData.svelte).
Wikipedia
Purpose: Download and index Kiwix Wikipedia .zim bundles for local article search and optional chat context.
Important controls:
- Enable Wikipedia search — Master toggle for Wikipedia-backed features in the product experience.
- Storage path — Where
.zimfiles live on disk. - Catalogue fetch — Uses the network to list downloadable bundles; indexing itself is local.
- Per-bundle Download, Index / Re-index, Stop, Remove (with optional delete of the
.zimfile).
Side effects: Downloads consume disk; indexing consumes CPU and Ollama embeddings for vectors. Chat’s “Use Wikipedia” toggle still gates whether retrieved articles enter a given conversation (AI assistant).
File Scanner
Purpose: Add external files or folders (outside the vault) as indexed sources for search and optional chat context.
Important controls:
- Add file / Add folder — Registers a path; the app walks supported formats, embeds chunks, and tracks progress.
- Global exclude patterns — Newline globs merged with each path; save then Rescan to apply.
- Per-path excludes, Rescan, Stop, Remove, Clean up stale entries, Import as note for a single file.
Side effects: Scanning reads your filesystem under the chosen roots and calls Ollama for embeddings — CPU, GPU, and time. Paths inside the vault are rejected (vault indexing covers those).
Keybinds
Purpose: Read-only summary of global shortcuts today.
Important controls: Custom rebinding is not yet available — the table matches built-ins like Ctrl+S, Ctrl+Shift+L, tab cycling, and Ctrl+Click for new tabs.
Side effects: None.
Help
Purpose: Bridges to supporting material outside the vault.
Important controls:
- Report a bug — Opens the HTTPS bug form on
https://grimoireapp.devwith version / OS / arch / bundle query parameters only — no note bodies or vault files. - Documentation / website — Opens
https://docs.grimoireapp.devandhttps://grimoireapp.dev.
Side effects: Opens URLs in your default browser via the OS.
Developer (dev builds only)
Purpose: Engineering aids — native context menu, Wikipedia perf logs, ZIM parse PoC, indexing benchmark, test data generator, and clean database.
Side effects: Benchmarks can hammer Ollama and disk; clean database wipes local vault data in the app (destructive, dev-only). Not shown in release builds.