Brilliant, appreciate the instructions. I had located the .node-red file in the dev user home, and checking PM2 status gave me the pointer that nr was running as a dev user process. I tried two or three ways to get vi and vim to write the settings file I found in nxtio/services/node-red/ and came up empty, I tried :w !sudo tee % as the dev user and what I thought was root.
I should have known this, but its been a while since I have had a user setup that needed sudo su run from a particular user login
dracula-scroll and midnight-red are my choice themes
And moving to 2.2.2 was long overdue both for monaco editor but alot of other grouping and alignment tools that were missing from 2.0.2
