Open Settings
Choose InstaCal → Settings or press Command-,. The sidebar groups related options; changes save immediately.
Settings areas
The sidebar lists them in this order:
| Area | What it controls |
|---|---|
| General | Launch at login, whether InstaCal shows in the Dock and menu bar or the menu bar only, and Open Links — which browser, meeting app and maps app your links open in, and which app places calls |
| Menu Bar | Which menu bar items exist (Calendar, Reminders, Tasks), icon, date style, click action, next item, reminder priority, countdown and the hidden-item notice |
| Appearance | Theme, text size, panel height and background, accent, week start, the calendar-window sidebar, Month, Week, Quarter and Year layout, indicators, week numbers, heat maps, mini calendar highlights, detail lines, agenda layout, all-day event style and day headers |
| Weather | Provider, location, units, icon set and moon phases |
| Notifications | System Notifications or Alarms window, fallback alerts, travel time, reminders, invitations, Schedule Risk Alerts and Quiet Hours |
| Privacy | App Lock, Private Calendars, and how much of an event a notification is allowed to show |
| Shortcuts | Global shortcuts, menu commands, views and panel arrow keys |
| Accounts | Apple permissions and every direct connection — Google, Microsoft, iCloud, CalDAV, subscriptions, Todoist, Zoom — plus how often accounts refresh and whether settings sync through iCloud |
| Calendars | Visibility, default, order, local colors, import/export and planning tools |
| Events | What + creates, the default alert on a new event, Apple Intelligence quick entry, which invitations show, the second time zone in event details, and Schedule Warnings |
| Reminders | Visible lists, defaults, and whether reminders appear in the agenda |
| Tasks | Task lists, whether tasks appear on the calendar, free-time scheduling hours and the task library |
| Countdowns | Saved important dates, their photos, the featured moment and which are pinned to the menu bar |
| Calendar Sets | Named calendar groups and Focus behavior |
| Smart Filters | Saved workspace rules and view settings |
| Templates | Reusable event and reminder field sets |
| About | The version you are running, what is included with your purchase, and Contact Us |
The sidebar was reorganized in InstaCal 3.8. Privacy, Events and About are new panes, and several settings moved into them out of General. If a setting is not where you remember it, the table above is where it is now.
Quiet Hours
Under Settings → Notifications → Quiet Hours, switch on Silence alerts overnight to stop InstaCal interrupting you during a window you choose. Quiet starts and Quiet ends set that window; out of the box it runs from 10:00 PM to 7:00 AM. A window that crosses midnight is understood — you do not need to split it into two.
Quiet Hours covers every kind of interruption InstaCal raises: event alerts, reminder alerts, departure alerts for travel time, Schedule Risk Alerts, invitations, and the Alarms window.
Alerts inside the window are skipped, not saved up. InstaCal does not queue them and deliver them when the window closes, because an alert that arrives after the meeting it was about is worse than no alert. If you need to be told about something overnight, leave Quiet Hours off for that period.
Setting Quiet starts and Quiet ends to the same time makes the whole day quiet.
Customize the interface
Under Settings → Appearance, choose System, Light or Dark. Adjust the panel background and accent color. Calendar options cover event indicators, week numbers, Quarter and Year heat maps and what happens when you select a day. Agenda options control row density, treatment of past events and day separators.
Day headers can show the full or abbreviated day name, different date formats, relative-day labels, custom colors, weather and moon details.
Panel height
Settings → Appearance → Panel → Panel height offers four presets:
| Preset | Height |
|---|---|
| Compact | 520 pt |
| Standard | 640 pt |
| Tall | 748 pt — the height a new install starts at |
| Extra Tall | 800 pt |
You can also drag the panel’s bottom edge to any height between 520 and 1000 pt; the picker then shows whichever preset is nearest.
Detail lines
Appearance → Details chooses up to two extra lines under each title, separately for Events, Tasks, Reminders and Countdowns. An empty or unavailable detail is skipped rather than leaving a blank line, and the same choice applies in your widgets. See Home Screen and Mac Widgets for the full list of what each kind can show.
How loud the all-day bubbles are
The bubbles across the top of a day can be drawn three ways, under Appearance → Agenda → All-day events:
| Style | What it looks like |
|---|---|
| Filled | A solid block of the calendar's color, which is how every earlier version drew them |
| Muted Colors | A soft tint of the same color, so four all-day events read as quietly as the timed rows under them |
| Outlined | The edge only, with the title sitting on the panel |
Filled is what you get if you never choose. The Up Next widget's all-day and countdown bars follow the same setting, so your Home Screen and your menu bar can be made to read the same way.
On iPhone and iPad the same choice is under Settings → Appearance → Agenda → All-Day Events.
Mini calendar highlights
Appearance → Mini Calendar shapes the month grid at the top of the panel. Highlight weekends puts a soft band down the Saturday and Sunday columns; Highlight the current week puts one behind the row today falls in. Bold numbers draws the day numbers in a heavier weight, and it is on to start with in 3.8.
The same three switches are on iPhone and iPad under Settings → Appearance → Mini Calendar, where they apply to the month grid; the week strip stays plain either way.
The calendar window’s layout
The same pane holds the settings that shape the full calendar window. Calendar → Sidebar chooses what its left column holds — Agenda, Months, Calendars, Months and Calendars or Hidden. Calendar → Month shows chooses All days or Work days. The Mac’s Month grid is always one continuous run of weeks, so there is no Grid scrolling picker here; that choice lives on iPhone and iPad under Settings → Appearance → Month View. Weekly View → Days Shown sets how many days Week shows at once, from 2 to 7, starting at 3.
Tip: Keep the menu bar panel open while changing Appearance. It updates as a live preview.
Choose what + creates
Settings → Events → New Events holds two choices that are easy to miss.
New items create picks what the footer's pencil and the window's + make on a plain click: Event, Reminder or Task. Their menus still name every kind, so this sets the default rather than removing a choice.
Alert sets the alert a new event starts with — the calendar's own default, none, at the time of the event, or a fixed lead from five minutes to a week. Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook can apply their own calendar default; Apple does not expose that setting, so Apple events start with no alert. Events you already have are left alone.
Choose which app opens your links
Settings → General → Open Links decides where a link goes when you click it in InstaCal. There are separate choices for Websites, Google Meet, Zoom and Microsoft Teams, plus Maps and Call phone numbers with. Each choice is saved on that Mac only, and it is not synced to your iPhone.
Websites lists every application on the Mac that has registered itself as able to open a web link, so whichever browsers you have installed appear by name. The three meeting choices start on Use Website Browser, meaning a meeting link follows whatever you picked for websites. Point one at its own app — Zoom, say — and only Zoom links go there. System Default deliberately ignores the website choice and hands the link to macOS.
Maps offers System Default, Apple Maps or Google Maps, and both the map preview in an event and its directions follow it. Google Maps has no Mac application, so it opens on the web in your website browser.
Call phone numbers with decides what opens when you click a phone number in an event's notes, location or dial-in row: FaceTime (the system handler for a tel: link — on a Mac that relays through a nearby iPhone, and on iPhone it is simply Phone), FaceTime Audio, WhatsApp, Google Voice or Zoom Phone. A number typed without a country code is passed on exactly as typed rather than being guessed at.
Open one link somewhere else, just this once
Right-click a link, a Join button or an address and InstaCal offers the other applications that can open it. Choosing one there opens the link in it without changing the saved preference, so a single Teams call that has to go through a browser does not cost you the setting.
The same menu has Copy Link, which copies the original address exactly as the organizer wrote it — never rewritten into an app-specific form, and it does not open anything.
If the app you chose is gone, InstaCal falls back to your website browser and then to the system default rather than doing nothing. A choice pointing at an application you have since removed shows as Unavailable app in the picker.
Give Reminders and Tasks their own menu bar items
Settings → Menu Bar → Menu Bar Items lists Calendar, Reminders and Tasks, each with a switch. Turn on more than one and InstaCal keeps a separate menu bar item for each, so Reminders or Tasks is one click away without going through the calendar. At least one has to stay on, so the last remaining switch is dimmed.
When Reminders or Tasks is on, a picker below chooses what its icon opens — the Panel, which closes when you click away, or the Window, which stays open and can be resized.
Ask for a feature
Settings → About → Contact Us holds two rows. Support Options opens a mail message for a problem you need help with. Request a Feature opens a form inside InstaCal instead — no mail client, no account.
Choose a Type — New feature, Improvement, Bug report, Design or Something else — write a one-line Summary of 3 to 120 characters, and add Details of up to 4,000 characters if you have them. Email and Screenshot are both optional: the request is sent anonymously, and an email address is only so you can get a reply. Choose Send Request.
Requests go to the people who build InstaCal, and one install can send ten a day. The same form is on iPhone and iPad under Settings → About → Request a Feature, where the screenshot comes from your photo library and is resized on the device before it is sent. See Privacy and Data Handling for exactly what leaves the device.
VoiceOver and Reduce Motion
VoiceOver reads the calendar rather than its pieces: every agenda row, month chip, time-grid block and list row is one spoken sentence, with its actions on the actions rotor, and icon-only buttons carry real names. InstaCal honours the system Reduce Motion setting throughout.
