NetLogo Preferences

Overview

This dialog lets you customize various NetLogo settings. On Windows and Linux, it is opened with the Tools menu “Preferences” item. For Macs, it’s under the “NetLogo” menu and reads “Settings”.

Items are organized into four tabs:

General Preferences
Code Preferences
Logging Preferences
Color Themes

General Preferences	Code Preferences

Logging Preferences	Color Themes

Use the check boxes, pull-down menus and text fields to change the default preference values. When you are done, click the OK button to save your changes, or the Cancel button to revert the preferences to the state they were in before you opened the dialog. Most preferences take effect immediately. You must exit and re-open NetLogo for the preferences that indicate “(restart required)” to take effect.

General Preferences

User Interface language

Choose a language for user interface items and error messages. NetLogo must be restarted for this preference to take effect. The default option is “Detect Language”, which will set the interface language to your system language, or English if your system language is not supported by NetLogo. The other available choices are English, Spanish, Chinese, Portuguese, Russian, and Japanese.

Reload the last used model on startup

NetLogo opens with an empty model by default. When this option is selected the most recently opened model will be loaded when NetLogo starts instead of an empty model.

Reload model on external changes

If you use an editor outside of NetLogo to change the model or any included .nls files, the changed file is updated in NetLogo.

Bold widget text

By default, widget text is not in bold, use this option to bold it.

Jump sliders to click location (instead of incrementing)

By default, clicking a slider location will cause the value of the slider to be set to the value at the click location and the slider widget thumb will jump to that location. Deselecting this option will cause the value to change by one increment towards the mouse click, also moving the widget thumb. This option applies to slider widgets and the Speed Slider.

UI Scale

This option is for Linux only. It must be set to the same value as your system UI scale or NetLogo will fail to resize its visual components correctly. This value must be a floating point number, or NetLogo will produce an error message.

Send anonymous usage statistics

By default NetLogo will now collect anonymous usage statistics from users while the application is running. Uncheck this option to disable data collection. When this option is enabled, NetLogo will collect information about your usage of tools and features of the NetLogo application and the NetLogo language. This information is analyzed by the NetLogo team in order to understand how often certain NetLogo features are being used, so as to inform development priorities. No personal or identifying information will be collected. If you have any questions or concerns about the collection and storage of this data, feel free to contact the NetLogo team at feedback@ccl.northwestern.edu.

Code Preferences

Sort order of procedures menu

Choices:

Alphabetical (default)
Order of appearance

Always show “Included Files” menu

By default the “Included Files” menu is only shown when the Code Tab has an “includes” statement. With this option the “Included Files” menu will always be in the Code Tab toolbar. That menu allows user to select and open an included file or choose the New Source File or Open Source File options.

Auto-focus text or tab with errors when model is compiled

If checked, NetLogo will bring you to the location of an error if one occurs during compilation.

Open code tab in separate window on startup

When checked the Code tab will appear in a separate window when NetLogo is opened.

Auto Indent

When selected, indentation in the Code Tab will be determined by the compiler, instead of by manually pressing the Tab key to change the indentation of a line.

Show line numbers

When selected line numbers will be shown on the left edge of the Code Tab.

Logging Preferences

Enable logging

Create a log file containing user actions. This option can be useful for debugging and research. NetLogo must be restarted for this preference to take effect. If logging is enabled you must also specify a log directory, or NetLogo will produce an error message.

Directory to store logs

Specifies the directory to which log files will be written. You can type in the directory name, or select a directory using the Browse… dialog. NetLogo must be restarted for this preference to take effect.

If logging is enabled one of the following may happen.

If you type in a non-existent directory you will see a dialog that says “The specified log directory does not exist, would you like to create it?” with options “Yes” and “No.”
You must have write permission for the log directory, otherwise you will get the message “NetLogo does not have permission to write to the specified log directory.”

Events to log:

Enter a comma-separate list of the event names or “shortcut” names. If you leave this value blank with logging enabled a set of default events will be logged. For detailed options see the Events section of the Logging documentation. The “all” option causes all the events be logged, including button, chooser, comment, compile, command-center, global, input-box, link, model-open, slider, speed-slider, start, switch, stop, turtle, widget-edit, and tick events.