# Preferences

Preferences are ways to customize anjuta to suit your tastes. Activate Settings Preferences to bring up the preferences dialog. If you want to reset the preferences to their default values, it can be done from Settings Set Default Preferences. Some are explained below.

## General

1. Project Directory is the path where you plan to put all your projects. Application wizard creates new projects in this directory only. The default project directory is ~/Projects and generally, this is just fine for most people. Also, when Open project is activated, this is the base directory where the file selectior will start.

2. History Size defines the maximum history length of recent projects, recent files and other combobox pop down list (eg. the search combo). Maximum possible values that could be given in these history sizes is 20. That value should be more than enough for most situations. Choose the right value for your own convenience.

3. Automatically load last project, if checked, will make anjuta (upon starting) to load the last project it was working on before it quit. However, this thing will not happen if anjuta is started with files and/or project given in command line. Anjuta will load these command line files/projects, even if this option is set.

4. Build Symbol Browser Automatically, if checked, will make symbol browser to automatically update it's database whenever necessary (for example, after some modifications in a file). This makes sure that the database is kept synchronized with the current state of the source, but at the cost of some additional CPU time.

5. Build File Browser Automatically, if checked, will make the file browser to automatically update it's database whenever necessary (for example, file saves). This option and the previous option could be disabled to improve the performace a bit at the expense of some mis-synchronization. In any case, you should be able to update these database from Project Update tags image. Project Rebuild tags image will build the whole database from scratch (as opposed to just updating it) and therefore takes longer time to complete (but you get most up to date database).

6. Update tags image automatically, if checked, will update the tags image automatically. Disable it if you want some improved performace.

7. Beep on job complete and Dialog on job complete, if checked, will beep and/or show a dialog when a job is completed (eg. compiling, building).

8. Show tooltips, if checked, will show tooltips on toolbar buttons (obviously). Keep it checked until you find it annoying.

9. Use glade components (experimental) should not be checked normally. It's an experimental feature and is not ready yet.

10. User Info: Provide your correct Name and Email address here. They are not used to do software registration (pun), rather they are used to create ChangeLog entries and other insert text bits.

## Build

1. Keep going when some targets cannot be build, if checked, will invoke the make with the -k or --keep-going option. This makes make to continue the make process even if there are errors found in some rules. Without this option, make terminates when it encounters the fist error. Read the make info page for more details.

2. Silent do not echo commands, if checked, will not show the make commands before they are executed.

3. Produce debugging output, if checked, produces lots of outputs during the build. Better keep it unchecked.

4. Warn when an undefined variable is referenced. does exactly what it says during the build process. Useful if you want to keep your Makefiles clean and tidy.

5. Autosave before Build will save the files before they are build, if checked. This makes sure the build gets the lasted file contents.

6. Max number of jobs gives the maximum number of jobs make can spawn during the build process. Usually, make likes to spawn as many processes as possible which are independent of each other. This virtually speeds up the process, can can clog the CPU if run on slow computers. Give a reasonable maximum number of jobs it should handle which will be comfortable with your computer. By default, it's set to 0 (zero) which means infinite number of jobs can be spawned.