Settings & privacy
Every settings panel explained, and an honest accounting of what (rarely) touches the network.
Settings map
| Panel | What’s in it |
|---|---|
| Appearance | The full theme catalog and light/dark mode — see Appearance & themes below. |
| Smart Tag Types | Add and edit mention/hashtag types — label, icon, color, attribute fields — and the “Suggest Smart Tags as I type” toggle. See Mentions & hashtags. |
| Highlights | Edit the highlight categories used in the reader — the colour-coded research buckets that drive the References library and each citation’s lineage. See References & citations. |
| Sound | Keyboard sound packs for ASMR blocks and the smart-tag recognition chime. |
| Vault | Storage stats (size, notebooks, files, entities), the full Re-index button, cleanup utilities, and your vault’s metadata. |
| AI Models | Provider keys, model choice, test connection. See AI models. |
| Summon → Capabilities | What Summon can read and do — web, files, Mac apps, library docs, and the gated actions. See Summon. |
| Memory | The agent memories Summon keeps about you and your work — review and clear what it has remembered. |
| Insights | Turn behavioral tracking off, set the history retention window (forever / 90 days / 6 months / 1 year), or clear all analytics history. See Insights. |
| MCP Server | Enable the server, manage the token, allow writes, watch the activity log. See MCP server. |
| Connectors | Personal tokens for Atlassian (Confluence/Jira), Notion and GitHub, so private pages can be read, highlighted and cited. Tokens are stored in your macOS Keychain; requests go straight from your device to the service. See References & citations. |
| Keyboard shortcuts | A one-screen reference of every shortcut Nomima responds to, grouped by what you’re doing — general, navigation, Summon, writing & formatting, blocks & smart tags, and zoom. Press ⌘/ from anywhere to jump straight here. |
| Help & diagnostics | The in-app bug reporter. Captures a redacted snapshot of recent activity, lets you review exactly what’s included, and submits it to the public issues board — queues offline if you’re not connected. See also nomima.io/report for the open issues board. |
| About | Version, the Check for updates button, a “What’s new” card, and the Nomima tagline. |
Appearance & themes
Nomima ships 27 built-in themes in the Appearance panel, organised into five groups. Pick one and the whole app re-skins instantly — editor, sidebar, graph and all.
Signature
The three brand looks. Nomima Glass is the default — a translucent, frosted shell. Nomima Dark and Nomima Light are its solid siblings.
Scenes
Nine themes that paint a scenic backdrop behind the translucent app, drifting slowly (and honouring your system’s reduced-motion setting): Aurora, Nightfall, Space, Forest, Ocean, Desert, Sunset, Highlands and Daybreak. Menus, dropdowns and popovers render cleanly above the drifting backdrop rather than being tinted by it.
Dark
Six solid dark hue families: Midnight, Focus, Evergreen, Copper, Nova and Mono.
Light
Seven solid light hue families: Paper, Frost, Blush, Lavender, Slate, Bloom and Mono Light.
Accessibility
Two high-contrast themes tuned to WCAG AAA: High Contrast Dark and High Contrast Light.
A couple of quirks worth knowing: Mono and Mono Light desaturate the entire app to strict black, white and grey. Nova, Bloom and every Scene use gradient accent buttons rather than a flat colour.
Privacy: what stays, what leaves
Nomima is local-first in the literal sense. Your vault — every note, file, comment and graph relationship — lives in a folder on your Mac (under ~/Library/Application Support), stored in an ordinary SQLite database. No account exists, no telemetry is collected, nothing syncs anywhere.
Every network call, and what triggers it
| Call | When | What’s sent |
|---|---|---|
| Update check | On launch / when you click “Check for updates” | A request for a version file — nothing about you or your notes |
| AI provider calls | Only when you use Summon, with a provider you configured | The conversation and relevant note context, to the provider you chose |
| Summon web search | Only if you enabled it in Settings | The search query |
| Publishing | Only when you publish a note | A snapshot of that note, uploaded to read.nomima.io so it can be viewed on the web, plus a small usage/analytics ping for the published page |
| Bookmark & article fetch | Only when you paste a URL as a bookmark or pop out its web view | A request to the page you’re bookmarking, to fetch its content |
| Bug report | Only when you send a report from Help & diagnostics | The redacted snapshot you reviewed, to the public issues board |
That’s the whole list — and outside of AI calls, everything here is triggered only when you publish a note, bookmark a page, or send a bug report. Offline, with no AI configured and none of those actions taken, Nomima makes zero network requests that involve your data, and every feature outside the AI section works exactly the same.
Pricing — it's all free
Nomima is completely free. Every feature — the full editor and every block, Smart Tags, the Knowledge Graph, Smart Views and Home, search, files, the Summon assistant, the MCP server, and creating your own templates — is included at no cost. There is no paid tier, no license key, and no subscription.
The only thing AI needs is your own API key (Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google) — you pay your provider directly, never Nomima. See AI models to set one up.
Vault care
- Back up your vault folder like any other documents — it’s self-contained and portable.
- Re-index (Settings → Vault) rebuilds search and the Knowledge Graph from your notes if anything ever looks stale.
- Storage stats on the same panel show exactly where the space goes.