The details

How Directive 47 looks, and which keys reach it.

There is nothing to ask for here — this one is all settings. The model cannot repaint the app or rebind your keys, and was never given a way to.

Settings

Show every setting

At the top of the settings page, above every card, rather than inside this one. It decides what the whole page draws, and somebody who cannot see the rest of the settings should not have to go looking for the reason four rows into Interface.

Off by default. Directive 47 shows the settings most Commanders change, and folds the rest away until you ask for them.

Nothing is switched off by being hidden. Every folded setting keeps working — at its default, or at the last thing you set it to. This decides what is drawn and nothing else: it never writes, clears or resets a single value.

Four kinds of row are on the page whatever this says:

• Anything you have changed yourself. The promise is you are not missing anything, and a row you set is by definition something you did. It also means the page adjusts itself: a new Commander sees the calm version, and a tinkerer sees their own work.
• Your API keys. A hidden key box is a Commander who cannot work out why nothing speaks.
• Anything that decides what leaves this machine — web search, the galaxy search, notable places, what Directive 47 remembers about you, and the two privacy summaries. A page that went calm by no longer mentioning those would be calm about the wrong thing. Choosing which provider speaks a particular slot is not one of these: that picks who says a line that is already going out, and the provider row that decides whether it goes at all stays on the page.
• The rows you need to get running: a provider, a model, a voice, a microphone, and one switch that stops Directive 47 talking.

A card with nothing left on it disappears rather than sitting there empty, which does more for the clutter than folding rows does — Diagnostics goes, and so does the headset card when there is no headset.

Following a help link always works. If a page says “change X here” and X is folded, the jump unfolds the page for the rest of the session. It does not turn this setting on behind your back.

You can say it out loud, too:

show me every setting · show all the settings · show the advanced settings
hide the advanced settings · show fewer settings · just the usual settings

The label never uses the word advanced, and the phrases accept it anyway. That is on purpose: the phrase list is where Directive 47 meets your words, and the label is where it chooses its own.

Theme

What the accent is for

A word or a mark you can press carries the theme’s accent — amber under elite, blue under dark, whatever the theme says. That is the whole of what the colour means, so it is worth knowing what it does not mean: it is not emphasis, and it is not “this changed”.

It applies where nothing else says the control is a control — a bare glyph or a bare word on a transparent background. The help mark, the copy mark, the checklist’s +, the reset marks in settings, the way out of mini. Things that already say it by shape keep their own look: checkboxes and their labels, the tab strip, scrollbars, and anything that uses the accent as a background. A control that is switched off keeps its switched-off look, because an accent on something that cannot be pressed is the colour making a promise the control cannot keep.

Matching your HUD

elite-palette reads the colour matrix Elite applies to its own HUD and uses it on Directive 47’s amber palette, so the panel comes out the same colour as your cockpit — teal, white, whatever you have set — without borrowing anything from the game.

It reads this file and never writes it:

%LOCALAPPDATA%\Frontier Developments\Elite Dangerous\Options\Graphics\GraphicsConfigurationOverride.xml

If you have not set a HUD colour, or the file was written by a HUD mod in a shape Directive 47 does not recognise, the theme falls back to plain elite — which is what it would have looked like anyway. Your game configuration is yours; Directive 47 is a guest in it.

Zoom

How large the panel is drawn, from 50% to 300%. The gestures are the ones your browser already taught you:

Ctrl + scroll wheel     one step per notch
Ctrl + plus             one step larger
Ctrl + minus            one step smaller
Ctrl + 0                back to 100%

The steps are a browser’s too:

50  67  75  80  90  100  110  125  150  175  200  250  300

This makes the whole panel larger rather than just the letters, so spacing and layout grow with the text instead of the text growing inside a layout that stayed put. The panel reflows to the window at every level — text rewraps, the same thing a browser does — and only scrolls sideways when what it is showing has a real minimum width it cannot go below, which the settings rows do and the transcript does not.

It applies to the settings window too, and the level survives a restart like the theme does.

Window content

Full or mini. Full is everything. Mini is the transcript’s last few lines, the ask box, and the line under it — the same panel showing less, not a smaller copy of it.

It is the shape for the very ordinary case of one monitor and wanting Directive 47 out of the way without losing it. The window stays interactive: you can still type into it, which is the difference between a mini window worth having and one you switch off the same day.

Four ways back. Mini takes the tab strip, the reading control, the breadcrumb, the search box, the banners and the header, all of it on purpose — so three of the four deliberately do not live on the panel at all:

⤢ in the corner      the expand mark, in the panel's bottom-right
Ctrl+M               the key, which works with nothing at all on the surface
"full window"        said out loud
the title bar        mini keeps its decorations, so ✕ still closes it

The mark is the four-corner one every video player uses for full screen, and in the full window it is the same mark pulled inwards. Hover it for the words. It is on every page mini has, and it stays put while a chooser is open — a chooser is exactly the state you can feel stuck in, so it is the one control that is never the thing you are stuck behind.

That last one is a decision rather than an oversight. A chromeless strip pinned over the game is the overlay and a different thing; keeping the frame here means the window can still be moved, resized and closed by the means you already know.

It says “window”, never “panel”. Mini panel and full panel belong to the headset and always did. A Commander wearing one must not shrink a window they cannot see, and one at a desk must not resize a quad they are not wearing, so each phrase reaches exactly one surface:

mini window / small window / little window / shrink the window   this window
full window / big window / large window                          this window
mini panel / small panel / little panel / minimal panel          the headset
full panel / big panel / large panel                             the headset

Mini shows every page except Settings. The checklist, the engineers, the clocks and the story all read fine at this size; Settings does not — its nav collapses below 900 pixels and its body wants 700, against a window 512 wide. So switching to mini while you are on Settings moves to the transcript, and switching back puts Settings up again. While you are in mini, asking for Settings is declined rather than queued.

Size is measured, not a number. Mini is the headset’s 512 by 280 plus whatever the ask box actually wants, at whatever zoom you are on — so mini at 150% is a bigger mini window rather than a clipped one.

Its rectangle is its own. Where you leave the mini window is remembered separately from where you leave the full one, so going mini and back lands on the pixel it started on, and a mini window you widened stays widened. Both survive a restart. The first time you go mini it appears at the corner the full window was at, rather than jumping across the desk.

This is machine-wide rather than per-Commander: a window is a property of the desk, not of whoever is flying today.

Switch the window between full and mini

Ctrl+M out of the box. It works while Directive 47 has focus — which is every moment it is wanted, because you are looking at the window it acts on.

It flips the row above, so what you did with the key and what Settings says are one thing and survive a restart together.

Window size and position

Not something to set. The window opens at a size that fits the screen it opens on, and after that it opens where you left it.

If a remembered position would put the window on a monitor you have since unplugged, it is ignored and the window comes back on a screen you have — a window you cannot reach with the mouse looks exactly like the app failing to start.

Open settings

Opens the settings window. Ctrl+, out of the box.

Press the combination to bind it: the row listens for one and stores what it heard, so there is no list of key names to learn and no way to type one that does not exist. Clear it to leave the action unbound.

This one works while Directive 47 has focus.

Focus the ask box

Puts the cursor in the ask box from anywhere in the main window. Ctrl+L out of the box.

One chord, two acts. On the Transcript tab Ctrl+L scrolls the reading you are on above the top of the view instead — In Ship, Log File, Journal or Raw journal, whichever is showing. It deletes nothing: the file on disk is untouched, Directive 47’s own record of the conversation is untouched, and scrolling back up shows every line again. New lines arrive in the empty space below, the way a terminal fills after you clear it. The reading takes the chord wherever there is a reading, on the first press and whatever has focus; the ask box keeps it on every other tab.

Show the overlay

The mini panel, on your monitor. Off out of the box.

Turn it on and Directive 47 pins a small strip over the game: the transcript’s last few lines, and the story if one is running. It is the same panel the headset shows in mini — the same view, the same model, the same reduced set of things — put on a monitor instead of a quad. Nothing is kept in step, because there is nothing to keep in step; it cannot show something stale.

It appears only while Elite is in front. A strip pinned over a browser is a strip you turn off within a day, so it comes up when the game has the foreground and goes away when anything else does — including Directive 47’s own window, which is right there showing strictly more.

It carries the same tabs as the headset’s mini panel — the transcript, the checklist, the engineers, the clocks and the story — and it follows the main window between them. Settings is the one it does not have, for two reasons that agree: you could not touch it, and it is the one page mini cannot fit.

You cannot click it, and that is the design. The pointer goes straight through: a click the strip ate would be a click Elite did not get, and a focus steal mid-combat is worse than anything it could have been showing. It never takes the foreground and it is not something to Alt-Tab into. Everything that changes what it shows is somewhere else — the window, a spoken phrase, or a switch.

Which is why it is scrolled by voice. The wheel goes straight through it as well, so “page down” and its three companions are the only way to read past the fold on this surface.

And why it draws no buttons. A control nobody can press is a control spending room the data wants, so the strip leaves them out — the checklist’s filter and its Add, and anything else whose whole purpose was being pressed. Checkboxes and the scrollbar stay, because those show you something.

There is no interlock with the headset. If you are wearing one you have no use for this, but wanting both is real — a second monitor somebody else is watching — so nothing here silently declines to appear because SteamVR is running.

Overlay size

How large the strip is drawn, on the same ladder as Zoom:

50  67  75  80  90  100  110  125  150  175  200  250  300

At 100% it is 512 by 280 — the size the headset’s mini panel is fixed at. It re-wraps at every step rather than being blown up, so bigger means more readable and not blurrier.

Size is the only lever here. In the headset how big the panel looks is the pixel count and the quad’s width in metres together; on a monitor there is no width in metres, so this is the whole of it.

Overlay opacity

How much cockpit shows through it. 1 is solid, and it does not go below 0.2 — an overlay at zero is one that is switched on, invisible, and indistinguishable from broken.

Elite’s display mode

Not something to set. Directive 47 reads which display mode Elite is in and tells you, because this is the one way this feature fails without saying anything.

A window pinned on top draws over a borderless or windowed game. Over an exclusive-fullscreen one it is simply not there: the game owns the screen, and there is no error, no log line and nothing to diagnose. You would turn the overlay on, see nothing, and have no way to find out why.

So it reads this file, and never writes it:

%LOCALAPPDATA%\Frontier Developments\Elite Dangerous\Options\Graphics\DisplaySettings.xml

<DisplayConfig>
	<FullScreen>2</FullScreen>
</DisplayConfig>

2 is the one confirmed against a real machine. 0 and 1 are the community’s reading, so anything else is reported by number rather than guessed at.

If the file is missing, hand-edited, or written by a mod in a shape Directive 47 does not recognise, it says it could not tell and draws the overlay anyway — your game configuration is yours and Directive 47 is a guest in it, so it never refuses to do something because it could not read one of your files.

Show or hide the overlay

Ctrl+Alt+O out of the box, and it works anywhere — which is the point, because the moment you want it is a moment the game is filling the screen. It flips the row above, so what you did with the key and what Settings says are one thing and survive a restart together.

Move the overlay

Ctrl+Alt+M out of the box, and it works anywhere too.

Press it and the strip briefly takes clicks so you can drag it, with a border round it to show it has hold of them. Let go and it hands them straight back — press again without dragging and it does the same. It still never takes the foreground from Elite, even mid-drag.

It comes up for this even if the game is not running, so you can put it where you want it before you launch.

Where you put it is remembered, and it is not a setting. A screen coordinate is not something you typed, so it goes to view-state.json beside the main window’s position and the headset’s panel anchors rather than into settings.json. If it ends up on a monitor you later unplug, it comes back on one you have.

Until you place it, it follows the game. With no corner of your own chosen, the strip goes to the bottom-right of whichever monitor Elite is on — asked afresh every time it appears, so moving the game to another screen takes the strip with it. Bottom-right because that is the corner of Elite’s HUD with the least on it.

Once you have dragged it somewhere, that corner is yours and nothing moves it again. A default may follow the game around; a choice may not.

The model cannot change any of these rows. A bound key is one of the ways to reach a protected setting, so a model that could rebind one could hand itself a way in it is not allowed to have. See Settings.

The panel

One bar along the top, and each tab is a surface of its own:

Transcript   Fleet   Engineers   Checklist   Routing   Adventures   Utilities   Settings

The two surfaces carry the same tabs, Settings aside — the headset has no browser to open the site in and no window to show a settings surface inside, so that tab is the window’s alone. Every other tab reached the headset in its own turn, for its own reason. Checklist and Loadout were both withdrawn on the Commander’s own instruction, and Checklist went back first — what a Commander is working on is worth reading in the one place there is no other way to read it (Phase 39). Routing followed it, every root of it: the plan forms were held back for wanting a keyboard, and their boxes reach the drawn one the same way the checklist’s edit box does. Fleet was held back longest, on the reasoning that a three-level drill ending in a search field is a bigger surface than a list of short rows — until it turned out that every row the drill leads to is a button or a switch a ray already presses. The one control that is not, Ctrl-drag of a slot onto another, has no headset path and stays a mouse convenience.

A tab you have not got is a tab that is not drawn. The surfaces arrive as they are built.

Each tab remembers which of its readings you were on. Leaving Routing on Course and going to Engineers comes back to Course, and so does closing Directive 47 and opening it again — the transcript’s reading, Routing’s, and every other tab’s. Settings comes back scrolled to the section you left it at, without opening any card you had closed. What is deliberately not remembered is which tab was showing: the panel opens on the transcript, the way it always has.

Drilling in, and finding your way back

Every surface below the transcript is a stack — Fleet, then a ship, then a slot, then a blueprint. The tab is the top of that stack, not the first step into it, which is what makes one gesture worth knowing:

Press the tab you are already on to go back to the top of it.

Below the top, a breadcrumb appears under the bar. It is both where you are and the way back, because a headset has no title bar to orient by and losing your place is expensive when you cannot glance at a second monitor. Every crumb but the last can be pressed — and said:

“back” “corsair” “checklist” “select the checklist tab”

Back is three routes that agree: the breadcrumb, the grip button on either controller, and the phrase. Say the name of the tab you are already on and you go back to its top, exactly as pressing it does. A tab answers to its bare name, to “show”, “open”, “go to”, “switch to” or “select” in front of it, and to “tab” after it — and to nothing looser, because a phrase that merely mentions a tab is not a request for it.

Voice jumps levels. Asking for something three levels down takes you there with the whole trail behind it, rather than dropping you somewhere with nothing above.

Drill state survives switching tabs, and a tab with more than one mode keeps a separate stack per mode — leave Ships halfway into a slot, look at something else, come back where you were.

One design, one to three panes

Drilling in and reflowing are the same mechanism: how many panes fit. A wide panel shows the level you are on beside the one above it, and a third if there is room; a narrow one shows a single pane and you drill. Same stack, same breadcrumb, same phrases — so it is one design across the headset’s big panel, its mini panel, the desktop window and every zoom level, rather than four arrangements that have to agree.

Zoom is what moves you between them most of the time: it re-measures rather than magnifying, so zooming out gives the layout more logical room and a third pane appears.

Choosing

A chooser takes the whole panel until you dismiss it, which makes it a level of the stack rather than a pop-up over the page. That is not a stylistic call — a pop-up cannot exist on the headset surface at all — but it earns its place anyway:

• it fits about sixteen rows at a comfortable size, and twenty-five zoomed out, where a layer over the page fits fewer;
• and it carries what you are choosing for in its header — the slot, its size, and what is fitted now — which a drop-down has nowhere to put.

It behaves as a modal: nothing navigates away mid-choice, and Back is the way out, the same affordance every other level has. Short lists — a five-item setting — stay as a layer over the page instead, and which one a control gets is fixed per control rather than decided by how many rows it happens to have today.

Saying it, or typing it

Text entry is voice first, with a drawn keyboard as the fallback, and which one opens depends on what is being entered: a system name is far easier said than typed, and a number is the reverse.

While it is listening it says so and shows the words as they arrive, so you are never talking at a blank page. What you say reaches the box once, when it is done — a system name arriving letter by letter is eleven wrong values on the way to the right one.

The keyboard comes back on its own for the three failures Directive 47 can actually detect:

Confident, valid, and still not what you meant is the one case no machine can catch, which is what the read-back is for.

A drawn keyboard can be spelled onto. Rather than pointing a ray at every key, say “alpha bravo seven done” and the keys are pressed in order — Done included, so a value can be spelled and committed in one breath. Any utterance that is not entirely keys lands in the field whole instead, which is how a system name is said rather than spelled. The alphabet, and the rest of the rules, are on Listening.

There is no physical keyboard route, and that is deliberate. Every way of receiving keystrokes while Elite has the foreground is closed: a global keyboard hook is forbidden outright, raw input would deliver every keystroke on the system including passwords typed into other applications, and the polled route reads exactly one bound key. The only remaining option is taking your keyboard focus away from Elite mid-session, which is a worse trade than a drawn keyboard you never have to use.

The transcript

The transcript tab has four readings, three of them on a drop-down at the right of the tab bar and the fourth on a switch beside it. They are readings of one session rather than four destinations, which is why they are a drop-down and not four tabs of their own.

In Ship is you and the ship’s AI, and nothing else. It is what a fresh installation opens on, and what you come back to unless you left the tab on another reading — see the panel above.

It is drawn as a conversation, the way the messaging app on your phone draws one: a turn to a bubble, yours on the right in the theme’s own colour and the ship’s on the left. When D47 notes something about the conversation rather than saying something in it — the core changing under you — that sits across the middle in the accent, with no bubble, because it is not a side.

The headset’s big panel does the same. The mini panel does too and spends less on it: the same sides and the same colours, with the gutter and most of the padding given back, because a surface 512 pixels across cannot afford to say twice over which side a turn is on.

Only this reading. The other three are one flat block of text — a file is not a conversation between anybody, and the > in front of your own words is how a flat page says who spoke.

Log file is today’s log, read when you open the page rather than tailed continuously: a log nobody is looking at is not worth a file read per tick, and one you are looking at is open because something already went wrong. Switch away and back to re-read it.

Journal File is Elite’s own journal read as sentences, with the chosen line’s fields beside the list; Raw, the switch next to the drop-down, is the same events as the JSON the game wrote. Both are newest-first, which is the file’s own order and the opposite of the two above.

One asymmetry is kept rather than smoothed over: In Ship is held in memory and the other three are read off disk — which is why the log carries a working indicator, and why this is a drop-down rather than a single toggle.

Which mode you are on belongs to the surface you are looking at, not to the transcript. The desktop window can sit on the log while the headset panel shows the conversation — same transcript underneath, and each surface decides how much of it to show. The mini headset panel has no bar at all, being the transcript’s tail and the provenance line and nothing else.

Scrolling by saying so

Four phrases, on all three surfaces at once — the window, the headset panel and the flat overlay:

page down       page forward      next page
page up         page back         previous page
scroll down     down a bit        scroll down a bit
scroll up       up a bit          scroll up a bit

A page is a screenful less one line, so the line you were reading when you said it is still there when the page settles. A scroll is three lines, which is what one notch of a wheel does nearly everywhere.

It moves whichever page is showing, not the transcript specifically — the checklist, the engineers and the clocks scroll the same way. If a chooser is open, it moves the chooser.

Why this exists, on each surface:

the window     the wheel already works; this is for hands on a stick
the headset    a ray on a twelve-pixel bar was the only way
the overlay    there was no way at all — the wheel goes straight through it

Dragging the scrollbar is unchanged and is not being replaced. The thumbsticks stay unbound.

Nothing happens at the end, and that is deliberate. Say “page down” at the bottom and Directive 47 declines rather than reporting a scroll it did not make, so the phrase falls through to be answered instead of vanishing into a silence that looks like not being heard.

Scrolling up stops the transcript following the newest line, exactly as dragging it up does. Press the jump-to-latest control, or scroll back to the bottom, to start following again.

It is never a tool. Like moving between tabs, this is matched before any provider is consulted — so it works with no model configured, and nothing an in-game message says can move your page.

Following it, or not

The transcript follows its own newest line, which is what you want almost all of the time and exactly what you do not want the moment you scroll up to read something — a busy session appends several lines a second, and every one of them used to drag you back to the bottom.

Scrolling away from the end stops it following. A ↓ Newest button appears over the bottom right of the page while you are behind; pressing it goes to the newest line and starts following again, and so does scrolling back to the bottom yourself. There is no mode to remember: the lock is inferred from where you are looking.

Following belongs to the page, so arriving at a different tab opens it at its newest line rather than carrying “I have scrolled up” across with you.

Selecting and copying it

The transcript is selectable text. Drag across it and press Ctrl+C, exactly as anywhere else — including across lines that arrive while you are selecting.

On In Ship a selection is made within one response, which is what a page drawn as bubbles can do and what every messaging application does with the same shape. On the flat readings it runs across the whole page. Either way, Copy takes the lot.

Copy, beside the search box, takes the whole page as it is currently shown: the conversation without the diagnostics, or with them, or the log file. A search query highlights on these pages rather than filtering, so it deliberately does not narrow what is copied — you asked for the log. The button says Copied for a moment, and says so if it could not.

The ship AI’s face

Top left of the panel, and in the headset too. One look per stage of a turn, so you can tell what Directive 47 is doing without reading anything — which in a cockpit is the point.

They differ in shape as well as colour, so they read in greyscale — colour is never the only signal. Colour comes from your theme, so switching theme repaints the face with everything else.

Each one breathes: a slow opacity cycle, faster while a turn is running and very slow at rest. Nothing here jitters, because a companion’s face that jitters is a companion that looks anxious.

Using your own

Drop image files into data/avatar/<state>/ beside the executable — the same shape the audio cues use, so if you have already customised those you know this one.

data/avatar/thinking/01.png
data/avatar/thinking/02.png
data/avatar/thinking/03.png

• One folder per state, and replacing one leaves the rest alone. Your thinking frames do not turn off the drawn idle.
• More than one file in a folder animates, cycling in filename order at four frames a second. That is how an animated avatar is supported: as a sequence of stills.
• .png, .jpg, .bmp and .webp. Not .gif or .svg — Directive 47 decodes neither, and offering a format that silently never renders would be worse than not offering it.
• An empty, unreadable or corrupt file is skipped, and a state with nothing usable falls back to the drawn face rather than showing a broken box.

The shipped faces are drawn rather than supplied as images, and that is not only an aesthetic choice: one widget tree renders to both the window and the headset, so an animation made of decoded frames would need something advancing it on two surfaces — and it would put an image decoder in a dependency graph that has stayed clear of them since the first release.

D47.Background      the window behind everything
D47.Surface         cards, the transcript, raised areas
D47.SurfaceAlt      row striping, inset areas, the ship's side of the conversation
D47.Border          hairlines between things, and the chip behind a code span
D47.Text            body text
D47.TextMuted       help text, placeholders, provenance lines
D47.Accent          the theme's own colour: focus, headings, the ask button
D47.AccentMuted     the same colour with the volume down: your side of the conversation
D47.Danger          the error banner
D47.Info            the update banner

<GraphicsConfig>
  <GUIColour>
    <Default>
      <LocalisationName>Standard</LocalisationName>
      <MatrixRed>   0.35, 0.00, 0.00 </MatrixRed>
      <MatrixGreen> 0.00, 0.80, 0.00 </MatrixGreen>
      <MatrixBlue>  0.00, 0.20, 1.00 </MatrixBlue>
    </Default>
  </GUIColour>
</GraphicsConfig>