System options provide an easy-to-use mechanism for persistent storage of user-settable options. It is possible to write new options (or access existing ones) using the Options API.

Each option is a singleton class defined by its Bean properties. These properties are displayed to the user in special nodes in the Explorer, so that they may be examined and modified, possibly triggering live changes in the IDE.

Special support is provided for "safe" serialization (with better failure modes than the default) for writing options to disk; hierarchical option clusters; and veto-aware options.