Cannot find the configuration files generated by Preferences GUI

[leira]

I just installed Amethyst, tried with some GUI settings, but I didn't see a .amethyst file under my home folder, nor any file under ~/Library/Application Support/Amethyst, where does Amethyst save the configurations from GUI?

Trello Card

[ianyh]

This seems to be a common point of confusion. The storage of in-app preferences is distinct from a configuration file. The configuration file ~/.amethyst is the old method of defining preferences and overrides in-app preferences. The in-app stuff uses a built-in Cocoa storage thing called NSUserDefaults. It's file backed and you can technically read the preferences by running defaults read com.amethyst.Amethyst, but a lot of it will be gibberish data for storing hotkey settings.

Does that answer your question?

[leira]

Yeah, it did answer my question.

Now it's a complain, not a question. If this is the direction Amethyst is going, then it's harder to manage the settings using a dotfile repository. Is there any recommended way do dotfile management for Amethyst if it's using NSUserDefaults?

[ianyh]

That is a fair complaint. The basic problem is that two-way binding is hard. What happens if you change your dotfile while Amethyst is running and then go update something in the in-app preferences? Which one wins out? The logic gets weird fairly fast. It's also not clear that updating something in-app would overwrite your entire dotfile with all of your selected preferences. I don't know of any application that does that, and it would certainly surprise me. This is also compounded by the fact that the dotfile preferences and in-app preferences don't actually match up. For example, you can't specify mods in-app, and you can't specify a command without using mods in the dotfile.

I'm not sure what the best option would be here. I suppose I could introduce a command-line mode of the application that would write your preferences out into a dotfile, but the mismatch would make that tricky. The preferences are technically just a .plist file somewhere so you can theoretically dump that and then put it back on a new system. It would be located at ~/Library/Preferences/com.amethyst.Amethyst.plist. Would that work as a compromise? I could even do an export preferences/import preferences thing in the in-app preferences.

[jonasekl]

I would love import/export of settings.

[cumanzor]

This is an old thread but this means there is no way to have custom configurations right? I would actually like to have some layouts that are not available by default, and change some of the hotkeys which are conflicting with VS Code.

[ianyh]

@cumanzor there is a preferences screen in the app, accessible from the status bar icon, that gives you control over which layouts are used and what the shortcuts for various commands are.

[ianyh]

Closing this in favor of #301