Appearance

Preferences → Appearance covers how the shade looks and how it opens.

Screenshot prefs-appearance.png

The Appearance tab in Preferences showing scroll, awning and transparency settings.

Opening the shade

Setting	What it does
Scroll direction	Which way opens the shade. Defaults to matching your input device
Trigger zone depth	How close to the top edge the pointer must be for a scroll to count
Esc closes the shade	Off by default. Even on, an active search takes the first Esc
Launch at startup	Start Shady Notes at login

A deeper trigger zone makes the shade easier to summon; a shallower one keeps it out of the way when you scroll documents near the top of the screen.

The awning and pull tab

The strip below the menu bar has four styles:

• Stripes only
• Pull tab below stripes
• Pull tab behind stripes
• Pull tab behind stripes, compact

Plus tab width and inactive opacity — how faint the tab goes once your pointer leaves it. Lower is subtler; too low is hard to find.

Transparency

Set independently for the shade, sticky notes and window mode, along with the window material and an editor background tint.

Transparency looks good over a plain desktop and becomes hard to read over busy content. If text ever feels low-contrast, this is the setting to change.

Workspace dots

Workspace pills can show as coloured dots in the toolbar, and the app icon carries a badge in the active workspace’s colour.

Chrome border

The border width around the shade — 0 removes it entirely.