The choice of metric, imperial or auto is available in both the uDIG preferences, as well as the scalebar style editor.

There are two locations in the GUI for setting metric, imperial or auto (detect from CRS). This can be confusing to the user, especially because the two locations actually do slightly different things.

• uDIG preferences (General -> uDIG UI) is used by the DistanceTool directly to affect the units displayed by that tool. It is also used by the scalebar when first adding it to the map, so it's initial setting is taken from this preference.
• Scalebar Style editor allows the user to change the choice specifically for the scalebar. This allows for the distancetool and scalebar to have different settings, but might be confusing to the user, if that was not their intention.

If the user sets the units in the scalebar, and then starts using the distance tool, they might be surprised that it did not get those settings.