Toolbox Settings
Click this icon to open the Tool Box which has the following tabs.
The Settings Tab
Show Status Bar: The status bar at the bottom of the display contains a lot of navigation information. If you have this info available elsewhere, turning this setting off increases the available space for the chart.
Show Printing Icon: When you need to print Chartlets
Enable Char Quilting: Chart Quilting.
Disable Full Screen Quilting: By default all visible charts of an appropriate scale are used in the quilt. With this box checked only charts that overlap the center of the screen are used in the quilt. Checking this box is easier on the system and may give a performance boost in certain circumstances.
Course Up Mode: Auto Follow and Display Orientation.
Lookahead Mode: Auto Follow and Display Orientation.
Show Chart Outlines: The borders of the available charts are shown. Vector charts are green, raster charts are red, and on CM93 available larger scale charts are purple. The CM93 chart outlines are not on if using quilting mode. As a safety precaution, the outlines of isolated dangers with large scale charts available, are shown in CM93 even if "Show Chart Outlines" is off, provided that quilting is not used and the scale is large enough. At a scale of 1:200.000 or larger these isolated Islands and dangers will be shown. Hence it is recommended not to use quilting in CM93 when on a longer passage. More on cm93.
Show Grid: Activate a latitude and longitude layer on the display. This feature only works if the display is in North Up mode. The grid is handy on vector charts, that normally lacks this feature.
Show Depth Units: Shows the charts depth units on the screen in embossed letters in the upper right corner. When in quilt mode, depth units are only shown if all charts in the quilt has the same depth unit.
Show skewed raster charts as North-up: Skewed chart are normally shown as intended by the cartographer, "Chart up". With this option they are rotated to show North-Up. If you are looking for speed, don't tick this box. I slows down the screen rendering . Skewed charts are a common feature along the US Intercoastal Waterway. More here: Auto Follow and Display Orientation
Use OpenGL Read the OpenGL page!
Enable Smooth Panning/Zooming This works best together with OpenGL. Test to see how it works with your graphic card. If you are using OpenGL, tick this box as well. This feature will not work if Toolbox->Etc->"Enable wheel-zoom-to-cursor" is activated.
OwnShip COG arrow predictor.....: Shows a red dashed line in front of your own boat, with present COG and ends in a small square, which represents where you will be in the set number of minutes, with the present speed. 6 minutes is a good starting value. If your vessel has a SOG of 10 knots the dashed line will be 1 nautical mile long.
If a heading sensor is available in the nmea data stream, and differs from COG, this is shown as a finer line with shorter dashes endiing in an open smal circle.
Harmonic dataset to use: Which tidal data to use. See Tides and Currents.
The GPS Tab:
NMEA Data Source: Set the source for your GPS connection. Note that you can write in this field. For example to get "Gippy" to work with OpenCPN, this is where you write the path to the virtual GPS created by Gippy. Similar, if you know that the GPS is on COM3, but this port does not show up in the list, just write "COM3" in the field.
Details for windows.
Due to performance reason OpenCPN by default only accepts COM ports up to 32. If this is not enough, OpenCPN will accept ports up to 42 with the following line added to the opencpn.ini configuration file:
[Settings]
WindowsComPortMax=42
In the tab select the 'NMEA Data Source' from the choices shown in the drop-down box, and choose the port to which your GPS is connected. If you are using a standard serial port, then choose the proper physical port number to match. If, on the other hand, you are using a USB GPS, then you will select the virtual serial port which was created by your GPS device driver. You may need to try several selections to find the correct port. For XP/Vista: Using the Device Manager, look for a serial port which appears and disappears dynamically as you plug and unplug the USB GPS cable. This is your virtual GPS serial port. When the properly configured GPS is connected, powered up, and recognized, and a show a green 
icon or gps status icon 
in the right end of the tool-bar. OpenCPN automatically configures bits, parity, etc. These do not need to be separately specified.
Details for Linux. Connect directly to one of the available physical ports, or use gpsd. For gpsd versions earlier than 2.9, select "Network GPSD" else select "Network LIBGPS". For Ubuntu 10.4 and later select "Network LIBGPS".
GPSD Data Server: is normally "localhost", but it's possible to have one gpsd server on a local network with many OpenCPN clients. In this case, specify the network address of the gpsd server. With OpenCPN it's possible to connect even a Windows instance, to a gpsd server this way.
NMEA Baude Rate: 4800 is the normal value for many devices, but some newer gps receivers require a different value. Check your documentation.
Use Garmin GRMN/GRMN(Host) mode for Waypoint and Route uploads. Make sure that this box is ticked, if you have a Garmin GPS. The reason for this is that Garmin units cannot accept route uploads via standard NMEA0183. This is a "design feature" of all Garmin receivers.
Show GPS/NMEA data stream window: If you check this box you will get a window that shows the NMEA data sentences coming into OpenCPN.
If gpsd is used on Linux, no data will be shown.
For simple NMEA data stream debugging, add the following to your opencpn.ini file:Under [Settings] add a line
DebugNMEA=1500
This will provide up to 1500 debug messages pertaining to NMEA traffic to the opencpn.log
Filter NMEA Course and Speed Data: Providing a rolling average of COG/SOG, with configurable sampling period. This feature is useful, for example, if you find that course and speed from the gps is varying erratically due to the sea state. The Dashboard plugin is not affected by this setting - COG and SOG are updated about once per second.
Course-Up Mode Display Update Period: This relates to how often the entire displayed chart is updated. The own-ship and AIS icons are still updated every second. The default value is 15 seconds.
Autopilot Output Port: Connect any NMEA 0183 compatible autopilot. Select the correct serial port from the list. OpenCPN does accept autopilot output on the main GPS input port, using the same baud rate, unless it is set to "AIS Port (Shared)".
If you need the NMEA RMC sentence output on your autopilot port, add the following in the opencpn.ini file, called opencpn.conf in Linux:
..........
[Settings]
AutoPilot NMEA Sentence Out=RMB;RMC
..........
Default is RMB only, and works for most autopilots.
Most users will not need this config entry.
The Chart Tab
This is treated in detail in Installing Charts
Vector Charts Tab
More about vector-charts Vector Charts.
The AIS Tab
More about AIS.
The Language and Font Tab
Languages: The following languages are available in OpenCPN 2.7 :
Brazilian Portuguese
Catalan
Chinese, Traditional
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English
Estonian
Finnish
French
Galician
German
Greek
Hungarian
Italian
Norwegian Bokmaal
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Choose your language here. Make sure your selected language has the support files installed on your computer (Linux). Default language is US English.
Remark: Changing the language will reset the font settings.
Font Options. Fonts can be selected for some elements on the display. Selecting the right size of font can have a dramatic impact on how values are presented. It's well worth playing around with these settings if you think that something is difficult to read for example.
The result of adjusting the "Console Value" font size.
The Etc. Tab
Show Track Icon. This is used to enable Ship Tracks. This is a visible trail behind your own craft.
Automatic Daily Tracks.
Automatic Daily Tracking ensures that the track-points collected throughout a single day (midnight to midnight in local zone time) are stored and managed as a single (possibly multi-segment) track.
If the Automatic Daily Tracking check-box is selected, the "Toggle Tracking" tool will - as before - turn tracking on and off. However, on turning it off, the accumulated track will be extended with the previous one, if it does not extend into yesterday. Disjoint segments are kept separate, time-adjacent segments are merged into a single segment.
Every Midnight the tracking is turned off and on again automatically, to ensure that the track does not span dates.
If Automatic Daily Tracking is selected during the day, when some tracks have already been created, only the last one will be merged with future daily tracks.
Assuming Automatic Daily Tracking is on, normally during tracking periods there will be two tracks visible in the Route Manager: the current track (red color track-points on the chart) and the previously accumulated track for the day. After toggling tracking off there will be just one track for this day.
If the timezone needs to be changed, it is a good idea to close OpenCPN application before..
With the manual capability of splitting and extending, the daily tracks can be easily managed at any time.
The daily tracks will be automatically named with the date in the local Time Zone, but can of course be changed manually
Without Automatic Daily Tracking selected, OpenCPN handles tracks as before.
Highlight Tracks shows a 10m wide highlighting, either side of the track. This is not selectable for individual tracks. The idea of the highlighting was to remind us that following a previous track exposes us to the inherent inaccuracy of GPS, and that the real track followed is most likely within the highlight region, but not necessarily in the middle. And this says nothing about the accuracy of the underlying cartography. For many charts it is prudent to assume at least 1.5 mm inaccuracy using the nominal scale of the chart. For a chart in scale 1:20,000 this translates to 30m.
Place Track-points at either time or distance interval. This affects the size of the data saved to keep the track visible. It also affects the "smoothness" of the track.
Radar rings: These show up as red rings centered on your gps position, and can be useful in different circumstances, such as keeping clear of dangers. The settings are, hopefully, intuitive.
Waypoint locking. Locks waypoints, and prevents accidental moving of them. This box should normally be ticked when under way.
GUI Options
Enable wheel-zoom-to-cursor: Normally when clicking on the screen, the display centers on the clicked point. The wheel zooms in/out always using the center of the display. With this box ticked, the zooming happens at the point of the cursor. This means that as soon as you start to zoom in the cursor stay in the same place on the screen and on approximately the same geographical position. The advantage is that the zooming in position can be fine tuned just using the cursor.
Toolbox->Settings->Enable Smooth Panning/Zooming will be completely disabled if ZoomToCursor is enabled.
Preserve scale when switching charts: Normally when switching charts OpenCPN will open the new chart scaled close to it's natural scale, the zoom factor stays the same. With this box ticked OpenCPN will keep the scale from the last chart, when switching, not exactly, but generally of the same magnitude. The zoom-factor will increase as you switches to smaller scale charts.
Play ship bells: Every half-hour the traditional ship bell will be heard.
Show toolbar in fullscreen mode: The key F11 toggles fullscreen mode on/off.
Enable transparent toolbar: On Linux it is necessary to activate a window manager compositing system, such as Compiz or GNOME Shell, to have a transparent toolbar.
Show layers initially:Layers that are saved in a directory called "layers", in the same place that holds your opencpn.ini(config) file(Windows) or /home/$USER/.opencpn/layers(Linux), are automatically loaded on start of OpenCPN. Any subdirectories in the layers directory, are also loaded.
To actually display the loaded layers on startup, tick this box. Further adjustment to visibility is possible in the Route Managers Layer Tab.
Show Lat/Long as: Pick the format for position display. This setting may not work for all plugins.
The Plugin Tab
The Plugin tab is treated on these pages
Plugins
Dashboard Plugin
GRIB Weather Plugin