Settings, organized

A familiar look

Every settings screen renders as rounded, inset cards with tonal circular icons, matching the look of the system Settings app rather than a plain list. A row that’s hidden — Notification dots, for instance, when the app doesn’t have notification access — doesn’t leave a gap or a broken corner; the card reshapes around whatever rows are actually visible.

Under the hood

Corner rounding is computed from a row’s position among the rows that are actually showing, not from their order in the underlying layout file, which is what lets a hidden row disappear cleanly instead of leaving a stray rounded corner in the middle of a card. Category groupings that end up empty after rows are hidden don’t render an empty card either.

How Settings is organized

Settings has five top-level cards: the “Search settings” pill; Home screen, Drawer, and Widgets; Export configuration and Import configuration; Permissions; and About, Privacy, Rate on Play Store, and a link to r/TailwindLauncher on Reddit.

Home screen holds Layout, Labels and Behavior, with Gestures as a nested screen underneath. Drawer holds the drawer-home switch, “Show folders in,” “Folders at the top,” “App list opens first on,” Frosted glass drawer, and Grid shape, followed by a Search category that lists all five search sources directly — there’s no separate Search screen to drill into first. Widgets holds the Recent apps controls. Permissions groups Notification dots, Accessibility service, Contacts, Calendar, and Usage access in one place. Privacy holds the two crash and usage reporting switches, plus four rows for deleting stored data: contact ranking, app search ranking, app launch history, and search history.

Finding a setting

A “Search settings” pill sits above the first card on the Settings screen. Tapping it opens a search field with the keyboard already up, and typing filters every settings row as you go. A result shows the setting’s name and the path to it — “Hide dock,” “Home screen › Layout” — and tapping one opens that screen with the row flashed so you can spot it. Searching a screen’s name, such as “Gestures,” offers the screen itself.

Results match a row’s own title first, then a handful of synonyms attached to it — searching “badges” finds Notification dots, and “hotseat” finds Hide dock — and last its description text. The field starts empty, with nothing to scroll through and no history kept, and a row this device doesn’t have is never offered.

Under the hood

A title match always ranks above a synonym or description match, so a row you search by its own name outranks one that merely mentions the word. Any row is searchable the moment it’s added to a settings screen, with nothing extra to wire up — which is also why a result’s breadcrumb can name the category a row sits in, on top of its screen: the Gestures screen has six rows titled only “Swipe up” and “Swipe down,” told apart only by which category — one, two, or three fingers — they’re filed under.

Grid shape

Each grid — home screen and drawer — is sized from its own single Grid shape row that opens a dialog with a live preview of the rows and columns you’re choosing.

Under the hood

The dialog holds your change in memory until you tap OK; tapping Cancel discards it entirely. A plain slider can’t offer that — a slider commits its value the moment you lift your finger, with no way to back out mid-drag.

Search sources

The Drawer screen’s Search category lists all five sources by name: Apps, Contacts, Calendar, Web, and Calculator. The first four each carry both an on/off switch and their own settings screen; Calculator is a plain switch with nothing further to configure.

Turning a source’s switch off doesn’t gray out its own settings screen — the rows there look exactly the same as when the source is on. The only way to tell is that tapping them no longer does anything.

Limits

Every card uses a single Material You accent color, rather than the different color per category the system Settings app uses.