Customizing SL - settings.ini etc.

There is file that can be used to customize various aspects of the SecondLife program's performance.

One thing that can be done with this file is to change the size of the text in different parts of the display.

It can also be used, as I learned in a post by Eep Quirk, to change the thickness of the glow that indicates the outlines of selected items when using the build editor.

The file is a text file, what an old timer like me might think of as an Ascii text file, whether that is precisely accurate terminology or not.

The file, in a default SL installationi on a Windows machine, lives in a folder called
C:\Documents and Settings\%%YourUserName%%\Application Data\SecondLife\user_settings

The file's name is settings.ini.

This file always has a bunch of settings in it, but there are additional settings that can be found through sneaky techniques searching for strings in the secondlife.exe file and other places. This is how the font size settings and the selected glow thickness settings were found.

The settings listed in this file produced by Second Life in it's normal mode of operation are in alphabetical order, or Ascii sort order, or some such very similar looking order.

Making modifications to the file would be a lot easier if it was known that the order of the settings didn't matter. Then you could just keep a simple text file with your customized additions and append it at the end. This could even be done with a batch file, and thus made as easy as clicking on a shortcut.

A batch file for this purpose might have just one line in it if the order that these setting appear is not a factor.

copy C:\Documents and Settings\%%YourUserName%%\Application Data\SecondLife\user_settings\settings.ini +C:\SLcustom\customization.ini C:\Documents and Settings\%%YourUserName%%\Application Data\SecondLife\user_settings\settings.ini

This tells the copy command to take the SL settings.ini file and add the text from a customization file with the settings you want to add and and copy the both of them back to a new SL settings.ini file in the right place for SL to use.

This might not work, I haven't tried it yet, I don't do much batch file writing anymore, surprise, surprise, but given how often one has to update SL, and thus lose custom settings.ini file entries, some kind of automizatioin of this sort might be worth pursuing.

I looked for this settings.ini file where you said to look at and don't see anything. Even did a search of the hard drive with no results...perhaps they changed this and it doesn't install anymore?

Oh, it's there, I am playing with it right now.

Assuming you are on a windows machine, you should be able to edit it by clicking Start, Run, and entering "%APPDATA%\secondlife\user_settings\settings.ini" and pressing enter.

%APPDATA% is a predefined system variable in windows that stands for the location of application data folders.

Under default conditions you would expand the C: drive, expand the Documents and Settings folder, expand the folder for the windows username you are logged in as, expand the Application Data folder, expand the SecondLife folder, and click on the user_settings folder.

When using windows Search for files and folders, just tell it to search for settins.ini, starting from the root of the C: drive, and it should find it. It just did on my system.

This file is not in the Program Files/ SecondLife folder!

Here is a picture of Windows Explorer with the file selected and ready for causing trouble in:

The first black rectangle below where it says "Document and Settings" would be your username that you are logged into windows as when you run SecondLife.

Great I was able to find it thanks to your last post, now can you tell me exactly what I need to place in the .ini file to increase the font size?

Thank you again for your help!

You are quite welcome. I have particular trouble with seeing the difference between the period and comma, the semicolon and colon, and the curly bracket with a normal parenthesis or vertical pipe.

First for some bad news. There is no way to adjust only the size of the text in the script editor. When you adjust the size of the script in the text editor, you will also be adjusting the size of the text in other parts of the interface.

The script editor uses a monospaced font, that is, the characters in a monospaced font are all the same width. Sometimes this spacing can look funny, but it is useful in program writing where you want your closing brackets to line up exactly with your opening brackets in order to keep yourself from being committed to the funny farm.

So to change the font size in the script editor you have to change the size of all the monospaced font instances in the program, which includes the Debug menu's information displays such as the Texture Console and the Debug Console.

But- even given that, it can still be worth it to change the size of the monospaced font, accept the garbled appearance of some Debug displays, in return for being able to read the scripting window.

This long preamble is just to keep you from feeling you got promised more than you get.

The line you are wanting to add would be:


Strife Onizuka says it matters that you use a Tab key between the "FontSizeMonospace" and the number, instead of spaces. I am not sure I believe him but he knows a lot more than I do about this stuff so I would do it his way until proven otherwise.

The value "12" is not necessarily the optimum value. You might want to change it to 10 or 14 or such. The bigger you make it the more it will screw up the other parts of the interface that make use of the monospaced font.

I personally might be able to get by with the same sized font but with some characters modified to make them bigger and more distinct. I have a font editing program and could in principal attempt to make a font with all the characters the same except for the problematic punctuation marks that are so small but so important in programming. This might work for me without screwing up the other displays as much as changing the size of the monospace font. If I do make this modified font I will make it available for anyone else with similar old age vision problems.

Thank you for taking the time to explain all this, it is appreciated!

There are fonts specifically designed to make letters hard to mix up for programming and chat alike. I'd love to see this brought into SL.... or hack it in myself.

http://www.tobias-jung.de/seekingprofont/

Proggy font looks great

http://www.proggyfonts.com/index.php?menu=download
(Proggy Clean, Proggy Square, Proggy Small, and Proggy Tiny)

Samples of more here...

http://www.lowing.org/fonts/