Language and appearance

Who this is for: everybody with a Nerve sign-in. No permission is required — these two settings are yours. Where: the account menu at the foot of the sidebar

Two settings sit next to each other in the account menu, and they look like the same kind of thing. They are not.

Your language follows you. Your appearance follows the screen. Change the language and it is your language at every property you work in, on every device you sign in from. Choose Dark and only this browser goes dark — the night desk can run dark while the same person's laptop at home stays light.

And a third thing follows neither of you: times and money belong to the property. Nothing on this page changes them.

Where the controls are#

Select your name and email at the foot of the sidebar. The menu that opens holds Account security, a Language row, an Appearance section, and Sign out.

The Language row shows the language you are reading right now, written in itself — so it is legible even when the menu around it is not.

Appearance#

Three modes:

Mode	What it does
Light	The light palette, whatever your device is set to
Dark	The dark palette, whatever your device is set to
System	Follows your operating system, and keeps following it

System is the default, and it is a live setting rather than a one-time reading. If your machine switches to dark at sunset, Nerve switches with it — no reload, no sign-out. Choosing Light or Dark outranks the operating system until you put it back on System.

The change applies the moment you select it: the menu closes and the whole app has already turned over, including the scrollbars and form controls, which take their colours from the theme rather than staying stubbornly light.

The same page, the same menu, one selection later.

Your choice is remembered on this browser, and it is read before the page paints — so reopening Nerve in dark mode does not flash white first.

Note

Appearance is not stored on your account, so it does not travel with you: a new laptop opens on System until you tell it otherwise. That is deliberate. It also means the setting stays behind on a shared terminal after you sign out — the front-desk machine keeps the mode the desk chose, not the mode the last person on shift preferred.

Language#

Select Language to open the full list. Nerve currently reads in three:

• English
• Bahasa Indonesia
• العربية

Each is written in its own language, so you can find yours without being able to read the menu around it.

Choosing a language closes the dialog and switches the app immediately.

The switch is instant, and it reaches further than the screen you are on: the menu labels, the error messages and the other text Nerve composes on the server come back in your language too, so the sidebar is not left in English around a translated page.

Because language is stored on your account, it is waiting for you the next time you sign in — on a different machine, at a different property, in a different organisation. And when you sign out of a shared terminal, your language leaves with you: the next person to sign in gets their own back.

Note

Where a translation is not finished yet, that text falls back to English rather than showing you a blank or a raw label. So a language may be partly English at first, and fills in as translations land — nothing goes missing in the meantime.

Arabic reads right to left#

Choosing العربية does not simply swap the words. The layout mirrors: the sidebar moves to the right-hand edge, menus open the other way, and every row reads from the right.

Right-to-left is a property of the language, not a separate switch — there is nothing extra to turn on.

What your language does not change#

This is the part worth reading twice, because it is what most people expect to move and it does not.

What	Follows	So
The words	you	Read Nerve in Arabic anywhere you work
The clock	the property	An arrival at a Jakarta hotel is shown in Jakarta time, to everyone
The money	the property	Its folios stay in its own currency — there is no personal display currency
Date and number formatting	the property	1.234,56 or 1,234.56, the property's way, whoever is looking

So a colleague reading Nerve in Arabic at an Indonesian hotel sees Arabic words in a mirrored layout — and Jakarta times, rupiah, and Indonesian number formatting.

The reason is operational rather than technical: a property's day is the property's day. If the clock followed the reader, two people discussing the same arrival would be looking at two different times, and a night audit would mean something different depending on who ran it.

The property's timezone, currency and formatting locale are set on the property itself — see properties and hotel settings. What the property calls things is a third, separate control: terminology lets a house rename the hospitality words in every language at once.

If something does not stick#

• The theme resets when you open Nerve somewhere else. Expected — it is per-browser. Set it again on that machine.
• The theme resets in the same browser. Private/incognito windows, and browsers set to clear site data on close, discard the stored choice. The mode still holds for the window you are in.
• The language went back to what it was. The change is saved to your account; if that save could not reach the server, the app keeps the new language for this browser and your account keeps the old one until you change it again. Switch it once more on a working connection.

What's next#

• Sign in and find your way around — the sidebar, the account menu, and why your menu differs from a colleague's
• Properties and hotel settings — where a property's timezone, currency and formatting live
• Terminology — renaming hospitality terms for your house