I’m using a Mac Mini and an iMac in two different buildings, connected by a LAN. I have used several resources and now realize all my settings will be in ~/Library/Application Support/Blender/X.X, where X.X is the most recent version. I know I can write a script to recursively copy everything in that folder from one computer to the other whenever I make changes. Dealing with that was no problem.
But now I have another issue. I needed to move the computers around and now my Mac Mini uses a good sized 4K monitor and my iMac will have a 2nd monitor. On the iMac, I want to be able to use the full screen on it for the 3D Viewport and put other workspaces on the 2nd monitor. So if I copy the settings from the iMac to the Mac Mini, I’ll have an issue with the Blender workspaces and window positions.
I know preferences change from Blender version to version. What can I do to keep the window and display position settings and copy all the other settings?
My first thoughts on this is it’ll be complex. I might need to write a Python script that I can use to save my screen settings in a separate file whenever I save. Then, if I’m copying settings, I need a way to merge those display settings from the current machine with the other settings from the other machine. Since settings will change in new versions, my thought is only deal with workspace and editor settings and try not to interact with any other settings.
There is hope !
Config is manly stored in two files : startup.blend and userpref.blend
That you’ll find in the .config/blender/version folder (under linux)
Startup contains the layout and that’s the one you need to keep on each computers.
But of course to share stuff in that file it will be complex, say you have a layout workspace and want that to display wireframes you’ll have to make manually the change on both computer.
One thing I didn’t mention, is that I uses the Keep UI option that I think is off by default.
What it does is that I always keep the same windows layout, when I open a file it will use my current layout rather than the one saved in the file.
I’ve worked with both workflow and they all have their advantages. But without this option activated doing all that is pointless since opening the file will load the saved layout !
That makes sense - in a dot-directory in Linux so it’s a hidden file.
It’ll really help me to paraphrase what you’re saying to be sure I understand this. It sounds like if I keep startup.blend on each computer, that’ll keep all the window and workspace information that I want kept in place on each computer. Then the only file I’ll have to worry about is userpref.blend, which will handle all the other things, like, for instance, shortcuts that show up when I press ‘Q’ and other settings.
Yeah that’s basically the idea, you’ll need to sync also addons and stuff like that obviously.
Now it’s hard to tell exactly what goes into which file, when you do menu file / save startup file it’s obviously the startup.blend that is being saved,
and when saving in the preferences it’s userpref.blend
Everything else, well there are much more chances that it goes in usepref than startup for sure but it’s hard to tell. There might be other files in the config … TBH I didn’t looked a lot into that !