The Configuration Panel is where you customise the Taboo interface and controls. Read on for information on every control found within it!

Profiles

Profiles provide a means of saving and storing various Configuration Panel configurations. You’ll only have the Default profile to start with, but in the interests of redundancy, you can’t make changes to this profile, so you’ll probably want to create your own and go nuts!

The Profile controls are always visible in the Configuration Panel, and switching profiles will update all the configuration settings immediately. You can change profiles by clicking the Active Profile dropdown list and selecting one of the available items. If you’ve made changes to the currently active profile, you’ll be prompted to save them – please note that these ‘changes’ are any changes you’ve made since you opened the Configuration Panel or selected the current profile, whichever was most recent. You’ll probably want to say Yes. Cancel simply cancels the selection of the new profile.

To add a new profile, simply click the New Profile… button and enter a name. Note that the new profile will be created identical to the profile that was active when you clicked New, so you may be able to save yourself some time by selecting a profile that’s similar to the one you want to create before actually creating it. Creating a new profile will switch you to it automatically, so once again you may be prompted to save any unsaved changes to the previous profile.

To remove an existing profile, you’re going to want to click the Delete Current button. This will permanently erase the profile, so you’ll be prompted to confirm the deletion.

As an aside, all the profile data are stored in XML files in the /config folder in the Taboo root folder. You can edit the profiles directly by opening these files up, but I’d hardly recommend it. I’ve tried to ensure you can’t break anything by changing things, but changing the name will cause a new profile to be created, so if you want to rename a profile, just select it in the Configuration Panel, create a new profile (which will mirror the source profile), and then delete the old one.

General

The General tab is home to the ‘preference options’, the settings that don’t so much affect the editing of tabs as the process you follow to edit them. If that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, comprehensive explanation.

Undo Queue Size

The undo queue size determines how many consecutive times you can undo your actions. Pretty simple. I haven’t done much testing of the effects of cranking this value up, but really 10-20 should be plenty. The undo/redo mechanism is fairly rudimentary at this point in time, so once I tighten it up a bit, expect this setting to disappear.

Working Directory

(TODO) If you’re like me, you don’t store your existing tab documents in your Taboo folder. The working directory lets you provide a full path to the folder they ARE located in, after which this path will be searched when using the save/open commands. Once those commands get a little sophistication, this will be the default directory for browsing for tabs to open/save as.

However I’m still undecided on just how to implement this, so I’ve left it disabled for now.

Toggles

Not only are these toggleable options pretty self-explantory, they’re also disabled, so I’ll just summarise them here.

Enable Input mode undo – Lets you undo tab edits performed in Input mode. These edits happen quickly however and eat up space in your undo queue, so you may wish to disable undoing them. NOTE: Switching back from Input mode to Edit mode will always be backed up in the undo queue – this option simply allows you to undo individual inputs made while in Input mode.

Enable Dynamic Count – Adds a count line beneath every staff and keeps it updated when the width of the bar changes.

Drums

The Drums tab provides access to the currently available drums and the notes available for each one. This lets you add that tambourine or cowbell that your song uses so much of.

Available Drums

Available drums and notes settingsThis is the first box to check out. You are given a list of all the drums that Taboo currently understands. These drums will be available when you’re adding new lines and scrolling through drum names by clicking on the in the tablature, so you really only want as many as you need.

To add a new drum, simply enter the abbreviation (it only takes 2 characters for now) in the textbox below the list and hit the Add Drum button. This will add your abbreviation to the bottom of the list of available drums (or below the currently selected drum, if applicable). The order in which the drums are listed is the order they will appear when you scroll through them in Edit mode, and you can modify the order by selecting a drum and clicking the Up and Down buttons. You can remove existing drums by selecting them and clicking the Remove Drum (X) button.

Available Notes

Once you have all the drums you need, you may want to add some custom notes to existing drums, or just add some notes to your new (empty) drums. Like the drums, these notes are what you scroll through when left clicking a note of tab.

To modify the available notes, you follow pretty much the same process as the drums. To add notes, simply type them into the textbox below the list and hit the Add Note(s) button. The (s) is there because you can type a string of notes and add them all at once if you prefer. The same deal goes for the Remove Note (X) button and Up and Down buttons as for the drums. Too easy!

Templates

The Templates tab gives you a look at what templates are available to be pasted into your tab. You can add new ones and modify/remove existing ones to generate a little collection of ‘macros’ to streamline your tabbing.

Available Templates

The list of available templatesThis is very similar to the Available Drums options, although the names are a little more descriptive. You are given a list of the currently available templates which you can preview by clicking on them.

To add a new template, simply type the name you want to give it in the textbox below the list and click the Add button. To remove an existing template, just select it and click the Remove button.

Template Preview

The Template Preview textbox lets you see the body of the selected template. You can also modify this text in Input mode (TODO: add Edit mode control) to change the content of the template, and then hit the Save Template button to update your list of templates permanently. If you just created a new template this will be empty, so you may want to copy some tablature from an existing template to speed things up.

A preview of the selected templateBasically this operates the same way as the Templates List in the Controls box in the main window, but with Add/Remove capabilities. I’ll work on extending the functionality and similarity of both of them to make them even more powerful.

Keys

(TODO) This will allow you to rebind the default controls, for instance changing Copy from Alt + LMB to J + LMB or something. For whatever reason. However the default controls are good enough, so this a pretty low priority.