Settings

Open settings with ⌘,, from the user menu, or by searching for a section in omni-search.

Three sections are worth visiting on your first day, and you can ignore the rest until something prompts you: Risk Management for your loss and position caps, Security if you are going to store exchange keys, and Country, which decides how connectors reach exchanges that route by region.

Profile

Display name and profile image, when you are signed in. Purely cosmetic.

Assistant

Where the assistant waits while you work, and how it talks. What powers it is the next section down.

Placement. Three choices. Sidebar, the default, docks the orb in the left nav rail with your other tools, where the suggestion flies out on hover or keyboard focus and appears on its own while a run is going. Bottom bar moves it to the bottom right in a strip below the workspace, suggestion readable, with the panes shrinking to make room so nothing is covered. Floating puts the same pill over the bottom right of your panes: the easiest to notice, and the only one that overlaps your layout. The orb moves as soon as you pick, no reload. Whichever you pick, the chat window drags anywhere you want it by its header. See the AI assistant.

Persona. Mentor, Balanced, or Technical: how much the assistant explains when it answers. The dropdown in the chat window’s header writes the same setting, and a change applies to your next message. On a phone this is the only place it can be set.

The persona rides the Settings and preferences sync domain below. The placement and wherever you dragged the window do not: they describe this screen, so every device keeps its own.

Intelligence

Your hosted AI subscription: current plan, credits used against granted, reset date, checkout, credit packs, and the billing portal. See AI providers.

Cloud Sync

What this device is willing to put in your account. The section only exists when the terminal is talking to an App Server, and it only has anything to say once you are signed in. Signed out, nothing syncs and everything you do stays here.

The switch at the top pauses everything without touching the switches below it, which is what you want for a machine you are borrowing. Under it is a live status line: syncing, up to date, nothing to send, or a failed attempt that will retry on your next change.

Then one switch per domain:

Three things about these switches are worth knowing before you flip one.

Switching something off never deletes anything. It stays on this device and the copy already in your account is left alone. It just stops updating and goes stale. Switch it back on and the two sides merge, newest change winning, which means something you deleted while it was off can come back if your account still has it.

Assistant conversations are the one domain that ships off. Every other switch here starts on and turning it off is the opt-out; this one starts off and you turn it on. The assistant’s own rail asks once, and the switch here is where you change your mind. While it is off, threads are kept on the device that made them and nothing is uploaded. See the assistant.

One of them has no local store. The trade journal only ever lives in your account, so off there means not recorded anywhere rather than recorded locally.

Plugin settings include plugin API keys. An AI provider key you typed into a plugin’s own settings travels with the Plugins domain. Exchange API keys and wallet secrets never do, in any domain, with any switch on: they are on the blocklist alongside the terminal lock, and the App Server has no schema to put them in. See Security and the security model.

The switches themselves are never synced. They describe what this device sends, so each device decides for itself.

Plugins

A shortcut into plugin management. See plugins.

Country

Pick your country and connectors route API requests to the correct regional endpoint. This matters more than it looks: OKX sends US and Australian users to us.okx.com and EU users to eea.okx.com, and some venues are unavailable in some regions entirely. Setting it correctly is the difference between a connector working and a connector timing out for reasons nobody can see.

Currency

Display currency for portfolio values and balances: USD, EUR, or GBP. It changes how values are shown, not what you hold.

Risk Management

Loss caps, position caps, trade caps, the breach action for each, the reset window, the gesture that commits an order, and the AI’s trade permissions. This is the most important page in settings and it has its own guide: risk guardrails.

Order confirmation. Press and hold is the default: you hold the submit button until it fills, and live orders hold longer than paper. Switch it to a single click if you place a lot of orders and want the ticket out of your way. Either way the risk limits above still apply.

Security

Two different things live here. The terminal lock puts a password prompt in front of the screen and stops the person at your desk. The credential vault encrypts your exchange API keys and wallet keys and stops someone who copies your disk. Turning one on does not turn on the other.

Terminal lock

Set a password of at least twelve characters and the terminal asks for it before it can be used on this device. There is no recovery. Nothing is encrypted with this password, so there is no key to escrow and no account to prove ownership against. Save it in your password manager before you close the dialog.

Biometric unlock. In a browser, phone included, you can add Face ID, Touch ID, a fingerprint reader, or Windows Hello as a way past the lock screen. It rides your device’s own unlock, so there is no new secret anywhere: what Pairlens stores is a credential id. Your password keeps working, and it stays the only way back in if the sensor stops recognising you.

It opens the screen and nothing else. If you also have a vault, your keys ask for their own password after the screen unlocks. What opens both in one gesture is a vault passkey, added under Ways to unlock below.

The desktop app has no biometric row here, because of how the web standard behind passkeys identifies an app. Touch ID on a Mac is offered through the vault instead.

When to lock. Five independent triggers:

Lock now closes settings and locks immediately. It ships without a keyboard shortcut on purpose, because the obvious chords belong to the workspace menu, the browser address bar, and macOS’s own screen lock. Assign one under Keyboard, or run it from the command palette.

Credential vault

In a browser the vault is not optional: enrolling a way to unlock it is a precondition for storing your first key, so it turns itself on the first time you connect an account. On desktop it is a switch. Your keys are already in the OS keychain there, and the vault adds a password or a passkey on top of that.

Ways to unlock lists everything enrolled, everything you can still add, and anything visible but out of reach with the reason written on the row. Any of them also opens the terminal lock screen.

Touch ID cannot be your only way in: macOS invalidates the key whenever the fingerprints on the Mac change, and a vault with nothing else in it would be one System Settings visit from unopenable. You cannot remove the last method either. There is no recovery here.

Changing how the vault opens asks for your password, even when it is already open. The reason is the second window: open the terminal in another tab and it inherits the unlocked state from the first, without anyone typing anything. That is useful, and it is exactly what you do not want standing behind “remove this passkey” on a machine you walked away from. Using your keys costs nothing there. Changing the locks costs one password.

Hard lock seals the vault rather than just covering the screen. Live bots and automations stop trading until you unlock again; paper bots keep running. It is the button for someone standing behind you, and it is unbound for the same reason.

What this does and does not protect

Armed bots keep trading while the screen is locked. Locking the screen is not pausing your strategies; hard lock is.

The vault and the lock screen share one attempt limit. Five wrong passwords arm a doubling delay capped at five minutes, and it survives a reload and a second window, so a wrong vault password also delays the lock screen.

How strong the lock screen is depends on whether a vault stands behind it. With a vault password set, the lock screen answers by actually decrypting your vault: it either works or it does not, so nothing an attacker can tamper with will make it say yes.

Without a vault there is nothing to decrypt, so the check is a stored fingerprint of your password. On desktop that lives in the system keychain and never leaves the machine. In a browser it lives in browser storage, so clearing site data removes the lock, and somebody who can edit that storage can get past the screen. What they reach is a terminal with no keys in it, because in that configuration there were none to protect.

The command-line tool takes API keys as arguments and never reads the vault at all.

For the guarantees behind all of this, and how each one is enforced, see the security model.

If you forget the password

The lock screen’s Forgot your password? leads to the only way past it: erase this device. It removes every exchange API key, wallet key, workspace, chart layout, and chat stored here, and you type RESET to confirm. Settings that sync to the cloud come back when you sign in again. Keys never do, because they were only ever on the device.

Appearance

Colour mode. Light, Dark, or System.

Theme. Eighteen bundled themes, plus any you have installed. Themes are independent of colour mode, and every bundled theme ships a light-mode chart palette too.

Recent tickers marquee. A running strip of live prices for pairs you have been looking at, above the pair header.

Keyboard

Every shortcut in the terminal is yours to change. The shortcut reference lists what the defaults are; this section is where you change them.

Presets are the starting point, and your own edits sit on top of whichever one you pick, so switching preset never throws your customizations away.

Below that is every command, grouped as General, Navigation, Workspace, Chart, Timeframes, and Drawing tools, with a search box because the list runs past forty rows. Hover a row to add a chord, remove one, or restore its default. A command can carry more than one chord, and a command can carry none: a few ship deliberately unbound, including Lock terminal and Hard lock, because the obvious chords are already taken and stealing one is worse than leaving a command discoverable and assignable here.

Recording is literal. The very next combination you press is the one that gets assigned, Escape and Enter included, so the recorder takes the keyboard away from everything else while it is armed. Leave it with the Stop button rather than a key.

Two warnings show up on their own. A chord bound to more than one command is listed under Shortcut conflicts at the top, and only the first command listed runs. A chord the browser or the operating system is likely to claim before Pairlens sees it is marked on its row: it is allowed, but it may never reach the app.

Reset all puts every command back to what the current preset says.

Rows marked for chart panes follow the routing rule in the shortcut reference: they go to the chart pane you last pointed at, and they are suppressed while you are typing.

Data Rate

How often connector plugins deliver updates. Lower rates mean less bandwidth and less CPU.

Energy Saver is worth knowing about before you conclude the app is heavy. On a laptop monitoring six pairs passively, it makes a visible difference to fan noise and battery.

Connection

Live status of your market-data connections. Data streams directly from exchanges through the installed connector plugins, with no intermediate server, so this page tells you which live connections are actually up.

Language

Seventeen languages: English, Spanish, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Russian, Ukrainian, French, Portuguese, German, Italian, Polish, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, Turkish, and Indonesian. The terminal picks up your browser or OS language on first run and you can override it here.

Privacy

Usage analytics. Off unless you turn it on. When enabled, it shares anonymous usage data and crash reports. Never your trades, API keys, or balances. The setting applies to this device only, and turning it off stops collection immediately. Builds without an analytics key configured collect nothing at all and say so.

Support prompts. After the terminal has earned its keep, it may ask you to support Pairlens, currently with a star on the GitHub repository. Whether and when to ask is decided from counters that never leave this device: days active, pairs explored, orders placed, things built. It appears at most once every two weeks, “Maybe later” pauses it for three weeks, and “Don’t ask again” is permanent.

Export your data. Downloads everything held for your account as one JSON file: profile, workspaces, chart layouts, trade journal, workflows, alerts, plugin settings, billing history, and your assistant conversations if you turned their sync on. Exchange API keys and wallet secrets are never in it, because they were never on our servers: they stay in the OS keychain on desktop or the encrypted vault in a browser.

Delete account. Permanently erases your account and everything synced to it, and cancels any active Intelligence subscription at the same time. You type your email address to confirm. There is no undo and no recovery.

Data that never left the device is untouched by deletion. Remove it by signing out and uninstalling.

If you are signed out, the page says so plainly: there is no account data on our servers, and everything Pairlens knows about you lives on this device.

Notifications

Where alerts go once they fire.

System notifications shows whether Pairlens is allowed to post to your notification centre, and grants it from a button rather than from a prompt that appears mid-alert. Safari only grants from a click, and a dismissed prompt is hard to undo. If your browser has already blocked them, the card says so and points you at the padlock in the address bar. Test one from here.

Connect a Telegram bot here (paste the token BotFather gives you, press Start in the bot, link the chat) and any alert can then deliver to it. The bot token is stored like an exchange key: OS keychain on desktop, encrypted vault in the browser, never on a Pairlens server. Full walkthrough in Alerts and notifications.

The rules themselves live under Notifications in the left nav.

Desktop menu

The desktop app carries the same settings in its native menubar, plus Check for Updates, New Window (⌘N), and back and forward navigation (⌘[ and ⌘]).