On Linux and Mac, the options directory is $HOME/.scidvspc/config/. On Windows the directory is in the program installation directory/bin/config. In here you'll find the main options file options.dat, and a few other files.
Options are saved automatically at program exit, or when Options-> Save Options is selected.
The Docked Windows layout is not saved automatically, but may be done manually using Options-> Save Layout.
Save Bases as Default will reopen all current databases the next time Scid starts (without command line options/files).
The colours and themes for the Main Board are set in the
The Rows colour is for the highlighted row in the Tree, Books, Finder, PlayerFinder and TournamentFinder windows. The Board arrows and drawables' colours are set in the Comment Editor.
The Highlight colour is for a few Name, Game and PGN window mouse-over highlights. These include the Name Editor and Game Saves autocomplete entries, the Crosstable and GameInfo Player Names mouse-over highlighting, and the Crosstable and Report's Game highlighting.
The Background Colour feature enables a bg colour for various text-like windows, or a Global background colour. Likewise, Text Colour enables a text fg colour for the same/simliar windows. Unsetting the Global and Text colour features won't work properly until Scid is restarted.
The standard Unix colour selector, tk_chooseColor, is very poor. If the tcl package 'BWidget' is found, it's great ::SelectColor widget will be used instead. To install BWidget, try 'apt install BWidget'.
Every time a game with a name in the list is loaded, the main chessboard will be flipped (if necessary) to show the game from that players perspective.
The first "My Player Name" is also used by the Player vs. Computer feature.
My Player Names are entered one per-line, and may contain the wildcards "?" (for exactly one character) and "*" (for a sequence of zero or more characters).
Scid has four basic fonts; Regular, Menu, Small and Fixed,
which can be customized via the
Many windows can quickly resize fonts by using Control+WheelMouse.
The Fixed font is used by the Tree and Crosstable windows, and requires a fixed-width font to make text allign nicely.
To alter the Gamelist font, right-click Database Switcher-> More-> Use Custom Font, which enables it to use the basic Small font.
Unfortunately, Tcl/Tk's support for high resolution displays is poor. If Microsoft Windows users see the text in the application and menus appearing washed out, try editing "Properties-> Compatibility-> Change high DPI settings" for the file C:\Scid vs PC-4.xx\bin\scid.exe and change "Override high DPI scaling behaviour" to "Scaling Performed by Application".
Tk has a feature known as "Themes" (or "Themed Tk" - ttk), which allow for custom graphics and colours for some specific GUI elements. Tk comes with a few themes installed by default, and these can be selected in Options-> Themes.
Installing extra themes can be tricky - and most custom themes are not terribly mature/complete. ScidvsPC does not make extensive use of the themes features, prefering instead the mature (though boring) default Tk widgets; though there are some good extra themes available in our "support files" downloads.
Theme installation is not quite trivial: Copy the theme(s) to one of Tk library directories (eg, on linux /usr/lib/tk8.6 or /usr/local/lib). If the theme is one of "tilegtk tileq keramik keramik_alt plastik dark", it will appear in the Themes Menu upon restart.
Otherwise, add the theme name to the above names (in the gui), or issue these commands from ScidvsPC's startup window command line.