Press Cmd+,, or choose Settings… from the Cue Canvas icon in the menu bar, to open the settings window.

What’s in it

Every feature Cue Canvas has a settings window for gets its own section:

Annotation. The five palette colours, the stroke-width presets and which one is selected, pressure modulation, auto-erase (same as Shift+E), and per-tool opacity (pen, line, arrow, rectangle, ellipse, highlighter, text).
Cursor Highlight. Shape, colour, size, opacity, border width, and whether a click ripples. “Enabled at launch” sets whether the halo is on the next time Cue Canvas starts; it does not switch it on or off right now . That’s still its own shortcut.
Spotlight. Shape, size, dim opacity, and whether other displays dim too.
Zoom. Magnification level, lens shape and size, and how much the pan eases when it follows the pointer. Shared by the lens and full-screen zoom.
Whiteboard. Board colour. (The whiteboard feature itself isn’t built yet. This just saves the colour for when it is.)
Capture. Where screenshots are saved, and how many recent ones the menu bar’s history keeps.
Keystroke Display, which corner it anchors to, its size, and how it fades. “Enabled at launch” works the same way as Cursor Highlight’s.
Shortcuts. See below.
General. Launch at login, and check for updates automatically.

Launch at login is worth turning on. Cue Canvas has no Dock icon and its shortcuts only work while it is running, so having it start with your Mac is what makes Shift+Cmd+D work whenever you need it. macOS may ask you to confirm the first time, under System Settings → General → Login Items.

Almost every change here takes effect immediately, on whatever’s currently on screen. A colour or size you pick is visible right away, whether or not that feature happens to be switched on at the moment. The two exceptions are noted above (“enabled at launch”), and Capture, which has nothing persistent to update. A folder or history-count change simply applies to the next screenshot you take.

The window also updates live the other way: if you change something with a keyboard shortcut while the settings window is open (auto-erase, or the zoom level with +/-), the window reflects it immediately.

Everything you change is saved automatically. There’s no separate Save button, and no Cancel: a change takes effect and is written to disk the moment you make it, except Shortcuts, below.

Shortcuts

Every action from the keyboard shortcuts page is listed with its current binding. Click Record, then press the keys you want. Cue Canvas shows you what it saw and, if that chord is already used by something else that could be active at the same time, a warning right there, before you save anything. Press Escape to back out of recording without changing anything. Unbind clears a shortcut entirely.

None of this takes effect until you click Save Shortcuts. Unlike every other section, because capturing a chord is a multi-key gesture with no single “settled” moment the way a slider or a color picker has. Saving takes effect immediately, without needing to restart Cue Canvas: press the new chord right after saving and it works.

Only the shortcuts you change are stored, as overrides on top of the defaults. Anything you never touch keeps whatever Cue Canvas ships with, so a later version can improve a default you were never using.

While you’re actively recording a chord, every other global shortcut (including the ones for other actions) is briefly paused, so that pressing a chord another action already owns is captured, and can warn you about the conflict. Instead of just triggering that other action. It comes back the instant you finish recording, one way or another.

Closing it

Click the close button, or press Cmd+W. There’s no separate shortcut to close it the way there is to open it. The same way Preferences windows work in every other Mac app.

While the settings window is open

Cue Canvas stops taking clicks on the overlay while the settings window has focus, so the window behaves like any other. Click back onto your screen and the overlay takes your drawing clicks again straight away. The same applies to the About window and the first-run welcome window.

The window scrolls. There are more sections than fit, and it can be resized.