QGIS is highly configurable through the Settings menu. Choose between Project Properties, Options and Customization.
Note
QGIS follows desktop guidelines for the location of options and project properties item. Consequently related to the OS you are using, location of some of items described below could be in the Project or the Settings menu.
In the properties window for the project under
Settings ‣ Project Properties (kde) or
Project ‣ Project Properties (Gnome, OS X or Windows), you
can set project-specific options.
In the General menu, the general settings let you:
Calculating areas and distances is a common need in GIS. However, these values are really tied to the underlying projection settings. The Measurements frame lets you control these parameters. You can indeed choose:
The Coordinate display allows you to choose and customize the format of units to use to display the mouse coordinate in the status bar and the derived coordinates shown via the identify tool.
Finally, you can define a project scale list, which overrides the global predefined scales.
General tab of Project Properties dialog
.qml
style defined. You can
also set the default transparency level for new layers and whether symbols
should have random colors assigned to them.
There is also an additional section where you can define specific colors for the
running project. You can find the added colors in the drop down menu of the color dialog
window present in each renderer.openProject()
, saveProject()
and
closeProject()
.Macro settings in QGIS
Some basic options for QGIS can be selected using the
Options dialog. Select the menu option Settings ‣
Options. The tabs where you can customize your
options are described below.
In the Authentication tab you can set authentication configurations and manage PKI certificates. See Authentication System for more details.
The customization dialog lets you (de)activate almost every element in the QGIS user interface. This can be very useful if you want to provide your end-users with a ‘light’ version of QGIS, containing only the icons, menus or panels they need.
Note
Before your changes are applied, you need to restart QGIS.
Figure Customization 1:
The Customization dialog
Ticking the Enable customization checkbox is the first step
on the way to QGIS customization. This enables the toolbar and the widget
panel from which you can uncheck and thus disable some GUI items.
The configurable item can be:
With Switch to catching widgets in main application, you
can click on an item in QGIS interface that you want to be hidden and
QGIS automatically unchecks the corresponding entry in the Customization dialog.
Once you setup your configuration, click [Apply] or [Ok] to validate your changes. This configuration becomes the one used by default by QGIS at the next startup.
The modifications can also be saved in a .ini
file using
Save To File button. This is a handy way to share a common QGIS
interface among multiple users. Just click on
Load from File
from the destination computer in order to import the
.ini
file.
You can also run command line tools and save various
setups for different use cases as well.
Tip
Easily restore predefined QGIS
The initial QGIS GUI configuration can be restored by one of the methods below:
qgis --nocustomization
false
the value of UI ‣ Customization ‣ Enabled
variable under Settings ‣ Options menu, Advanced tab.In most cases, you need to restart QGIS in order to have the change applied.