How to properly migrate/clone style settings from 1 PC to many others?

automatorMaxima

I do a lot of AutoHotkey work on Notepad++ and have many specific settings for the Styling. Even after copy/pasting the theme/styles folder, the new PCs don’t follow the same style as my original PC. is there a guide on how to do this properly?

Thank you.

PeterJones

@automatormaxima ,

AutoHotKey styling wouldn’t be in the themes folder or the active stylers.xml. Since AHK isn’t a built-in lexer, you would find it in the UDL definitions, so that means either the old userDefineLang.xml which has many UDL definitions in one file, or in the userDefineLang\ subfolder, which can have a separate file for every UDL.

If you really want to copy all your settings from one PC to another, just copy the whole %AppData%\Notepad++ directory hierarchy.

Terry R

@peterjones said in How to properly migrate/clone style settings from 1 PC to many others?:

If you really want to copy all your settings from one PC to another, just copy the whole %AppData%\Notepad++ directory hierarchy.

I had considered this and was checking some of the XML (configuration) files within this folder structure. some of them contain path names unique to the resident PC. I wonder how NPP reacts when those pathnames are tried under a different environment that a different PC, likely with different user ID has? And then there is the “cloud” setting to consider.

As I see it, the developer has never intended on having a cloning mechanism created. So there isn’t a formal approach to cloning, this would be a bit of hit and miss with potential for some options to fail, unless the user was prepared to re-check all preferences etc after cloning.

Terry

artie-finkelstein

@terry-r said in How to properly migrate/clone style settings from 1 PC to many others?:

So there isn’t a formal approach to cloning, this would be a bit of hit and miss with potential for some options to fail, unless the user was prepared to re-check all preferences etc after cloning.

I can vouch for the miss part of this. I’m attempting to “clone” the 32 bit ‘portable’ setup I use on my Win7 64 bit machine to a Win 8.1 tablet. Most everything seems to work most of the time, but there are enough intermittent issues that make me question the wisdom of a plain copy. Note: It does work well enough that I decided to jump to a Win10 Pro tablet with a decent sized screen as a ‘cloning’ target. My aging eyes couldn’t handle the too small screen on the Win8.1 mini-tablet.

Alan Kilborn

@peterjones said in How to properly migrate/clone style settings from 1 PC to many others?:

If you really want to copy all your settings from one PC to another, just copy the whole %AppData%\Notepad++ directory hierarchy.

To me, it sounds like Peter’s suggestion would work fine.

@terry-r said in How to properly migrate/clone style settings from 1 PC to many others?:

I had considered this and was checking some of the XML (configuration) files within this folder structure. some of them contain path names unique to the resident PC.

Can you elaborate on what paths you found?

PeterJones

@terry-r said,
I had considered this and was checking some of the XML (configuration) files within this folder structure. some of them contain path names unique to the resident PC.

@Alan-Kilborn replied,

Can you elaborate on what paths you found?

When I searched my Notepad++ config for path-looking lines, I saw:

session.xml contains the paths to the files in the current session. Those, of course, are machine-dependent. But Notepad++ will silently not open any file in the session that doesn’t exist
config.xml contains path names in the recent-file-list and in the search history (the find-in-files path field)
shortcuts.xml may contain paths in the user-defined-commands; again, it won’t cause problems if they don’t exist (other than those commands won’t run when called)
some of the plugins config files may have paths

But since the OP wanted a clone of the settings, it doesn’t bother me to be replicating these paths, because cloning necessarily implies copying all the settings.

But I did realize that just copying %AppData%\Notepad++ may miss a couple settings: the “settings” that are controlled by the 0-byte files in the program-install folder, and the auto-completion config files in the program-install folder. So if those have been customized by @automatorMaxima , those will have to be copied to the new machine as well.

Alan Kilborn

@peterjones

Yea, what I was trying to get to the bottom of was: “Is there anything that Notepad++ itself needs that wouldn’t be copied over in your original technique?”

The items in your four bullet points would NOT be a concern for that. If users wanted those things to carryover for the first 3 bullet points, it is on them because it is “data”, not part of N++ that is needed. The point about plugins is “meh” because if plugin developers choose to hardcode paths, that’s their development choice, and well, the N++ devs and the support people can’t be expected to save them from themselves (nor account for that kind of stuff for all possible plugins when answering a question such as the OP’s).

But I did realize that just copying %AppData%\Notepad++ may miss a couple settings…

Good info. And another argument for using the portable version.