Configuration

Tabularis is designed to work perfectly out-of-the-box, but offers extensive configuration options via the UI Settings panel and an underlying config.json file.

Accessing Settings

Open the Settings panel from:

• Sidebar: Click the gear icon at the bottom of the left sidebar

General Settings

• Language Support: Native translations for English, Italian, Spanish, Chinese (Simplified), French, German, Japanese, Russian, Tagalog (added in v0.15.0), Korean (added in v0.16.0), and Brazilian Portuguese (added in v0.17.0). The app defaults to your OS locale — Filipino (fil) systems map to Tagalog automatically, and region-coded locales like pt-BR resolve correctly — and changing the language applies immediately. With eleven languages the picker is now a searchable select showing each language's native name.
• Display Timezone: A searchable picker of IANA timezones (with current UTC-offset labels) under Settings → Localization, defaulting to Auto (your OS zone). The selected zone drives every UI timestamp — AI activity log, query history, favorites — plus CSV / JSON / notebook exports and their default filenames. Query-history date grouping (today / yesterday / older) is classified in the same zone, so headers and per-row times always agree.
• Window Decorations (since v0.22.0): Automatic (default), Always show or Always hide for the native titlebar. In Automatic mode Tabularis hides native decorations on Linux when it detects a tiling window manager (Hyprland, Sway, i3, Niri, River, bspwm, awesome, dwm, leftwm, qtile, xmonad) through the session's environment variables, and keeps them on everywhere else. The choice applies to open windows immediately and to secondary windows when they are created. Stored as windowDecorations in config.json.
• Delay safety confirmations (since v0.21.0): off by default. When enabled, the confirm button of the destructive-query and production-write dialogs stays disabled for five seconds so the warning is actually read. Stored as safetyConfirmationDelayEnabled in config.json.
• Startup: Show Welcome Screen, Reopen Last Connections (on by default, reconnects to the connections that were open when the app was last closed) and Start Maximized (off by default). Stored as showWelcome, autoConnectLastConnection and startMaximized.
• Update Checks: Lives in Settings → Info, not General. Check for updates on startup enables or disables the automatic check at launch, and Release channel picks Stable (tested releases) or Nightly (builds from the latest main). Checks query the GitHub Releases API — no version data is sent, only a GET request is made.

Network & Proxies

Since v0.24.0, Settings → Network configures a shared HTTP CONNECT or SOCKS5 proxy. Supply its host, port and optional username/password, then opt in the traffic scopes you need:

• App network requests: update checks, plugin downloads, registry requests and WebDAV backups.
• Database connections: direct database TCP traffic.
• AI / LLM endpoints: provider requests.
• SSH tunnels: the outbound bastion connection.

The global proxy is disabled by default and scopes are opt-in. Database connections (Advanced) and individual AI providers (Settings → AI) can inherit the global setting, use a custom proxy or explicitly disable proxying. Target overrides take precedence. Passwords are stored in the OS keychain, not in configuration files.

SSH and Kubernetes tunnel endpoints are not proxied a second time on their local database leg. SSH profiles do not have their own proxy picker: use the global SSH scope or the database connection's override. Saving global proxy settings stops existing SSH tunnels and cached forwards; reconnect afterward. This does not configure arbitrary networking implemented inside third-party plugins, and proxy routing does not replace endpoint TLS.

Result Font

Since v0.24.0, Settings → Appearance → Data Grid → Result font controls result cells, inline edit inputs and multiline textareas independently of SQL editor typography. Choose Same as interface, a bundled font or a custom family. The default remains JetBrains Mono. See Themes.

Storage Paths & config.json

Tabularis stores non-sensitive configuration and UI preferences in a central config.json. Connection metadata lives in a separate connections.json in the same directory. Passwords and SSH passphrases are never stored in config.json.

File Locations

Custom Storage Location

Since v0.23.0 the whole data folder can be moved from Settings → Storage. Connections, config.json, saved queries, themes, notebooks, query history and custom connection icons all live under the chosen root; installed plugins are the one exception and always stay in the platform data directory, because they are per-platform binaries. Pointing the folder at a synced location (iCloud Drive, Dropbox, …) is the intended way to share connections across machines.

• Change folder… opens a folder picker. If the target already contains Tabularis data (for example synced from another machine) the default is to use it as is; otherwise you can copy your current data into it (existing files are never overwritten) or start with an empty folder. The current folder, anything nested inside it or containing it, relative paths and plain files are rejected.
• The choice is stored in storage-location.json inside the default config directory listed above, so the app finds it before loading anything else. It is resolved once per process, so a change requires a restart; the tab shows a Restart now banner until then. The GUI and the tabularis --mcp subprocess read the same pointer file.
• The TABULARIS_DATA_DIR environment variable overrides the pointer file for a launch or an installation (TABULARIS_DATA_DIR=/path/to/folder tabularis). When it is set the tab shows the folder as read-only. It applies to the MCP server too and is the right tool for portable installs, scripts and development.
• Tabularis reads the folder at startup. Avoid running two instances on the same folder at the same time, for example on two machines while it is still syncing.

Manually Editing config.json

The safest way to edit the file is from inside the app: Edit config.json, at the bottom of the Settings navigation, opens the raw file in a JSON editor. Saving validates the content against the configuration schema (an invalid value, such as a string where a number is expected, is rejected with an error) and then asks you to restart, because changes only apply after a restart.

You can also edit the file with any text editor while the application is closed. Tabularis saves the full settings every time you change a setting in the UI, so edits made while the app is running are overwritten by the next change.

A minimal valid config.json looks like:

{
  "language": "auto",
  "fontSize": 14,
  "aiEnabled": false
}

Any key omitted from the file falls back to its default value. You do not need a complete file.

config.json Full Reference

The in-app log viewer has its own backend settings and commands, but those are not stored as loggingEnabled or maxLogEntries fields in config.json.

Application Logs

For debugging connection failures, plugin crashes, or unexpected behavior, Tabularis keeps an application log in memory. It is not written to a log file on disk unless you export it.

Viewing Logs in the App

Open Settings → Logs. The tab lists the collected entries with their timestamp, level and message, and lets you:

• Filter by level (Debug, Info, Warn, Error).
• Refresh the list and Clear Logs.
• Export Logs to a .log file of your choice, ready to attach to a bug report.
• Turn Enable Logging off, or change Max Log Entries (100–10000 in steps of 100, default 1000). Logs are kept in memory only, so they are lost when the app quits; once the limit is reached the oldest entries are dropped.

The log level is fixed at Info. Setting RUST_LOG has no effect.

Terminal Output

The same messages are also printed to standard error. To watch them live, launch Tabularis from a terminal:

# Linux (on macOS run the binary inside the app bundle,
# e.g. /Applications/tabularis.app/Contents/MacOS/tabularis)
tabularis

Plugin drivers' standard error is inherited by the main process, so messages a plugin prints to stderr appear in that terminal too, not in Settings → Logs.

Privacy & Telemetry

Tabularis is built with a strict zero-telemetry policy.

• No analytics SDKs: We do not embed Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Sentry (in production), or any third-party tracking library.
• No crash reporting: No automatic crash reports are sent anywhere.
• No usage data: Feature usage, query counts, session duration — none of this is tracked or transmitted.
• Network requests made by Tabularis:
  • Your configured database host(s)
  • The GitHub Releases API for update checks, if enabled: api.github.com/repos/TabularisDB/tabularis/releases/latest on the Stable channel, or …/releases?per_page=30 plus the chosen release's latest.json on the Nightly channel
  • The Tabularium plugin registry (registry.tabularis.dev by default) and the plugin and theme downloads it points to, when you browse or install them
  • The changelog (raw.githubusercontent.com/TabularisDB/tabularis/main/CHANGELOG.md) for the What's New and release notes views
  • Your WebDAV server, if you back up connections to WebDAV
  • Your chosen AI provider endpoint (only if AI is enabled and you trigger it)
  • Any URLs referenced in plugins you have installed

You can verify all outgoing network connections using lsof -i (macOS/Linux) or Resource Monitor (Windows) while the application runs.

Column Masking (Settings → Privacy)

Since v0.19.0, a Privacy tab in Settings controls sensitive-column masking in the results grid:

• an on/off toggle (masking is on by default),
• the column-name patterns, one per line, matched as case-insensitive substrings (password, email, token, ssn, … out of the box),
• per-connection overrides as table.column entries, one per line: an Always mask list (masked even when no pattern matches) and a Never mask list (never masked even when a pattern matches) — never-mask wins over always-mask, which wins over the name patterns.

Masking is display-only: copy and export keep the real values. See Data Grid → Column Masking for the grid-side behavior.

Resetting to Defaults

To reset all settings to factory defaults:

1. Close Tabularis completely.
2. Delete or rename the config.json file.
3. Relaunch Tabularis. A fresh config.json with all defaults will be created.

Important: This does NOT delete saved connections. Connection metadata is stored in a separate connections.json file in the same directory. To also remove connections, delete connections.json. Passwords stored in the OS keychain must be removed manually (via Keychain Access on macOS, Credential Manager on Windows, or secret-tool on Linux).