Settings files ???

I see a settings.xml file in the user_settings folder, and settings_xxxx for various versions of viewer.

In the firstname_lastname folder, I see settings_per_account.xml .

There can also be a file with settings in it called overrides.xml in the firstname_lastname folder, so I'm led to believe, though I don't have one.

In the program files app_settings folder I see another settings.xml file, plus another setting_per_account.xml, and a settings_files.xml.

I'm finding this a bit confusing.

Would anyone care to explain this a bit?

??what??

Wow Suezanne. That is some serious spelunking in the folders there!

The maze of settings files makes my head swim, but I am bored so let's list them out.

First there are hardcoded values for most settings compiled right into the viewer source code. At startup, the viewer reads the settings.xml in the program folder and replaces many of those values with what it sees in there. This is kind of redundant, but some of the values are different, it lets "factory settings" be altered without a recompile.

Next up is the settings.xml in the user_settings folder, which can have a different name depending on the exact viewer edition. This will hold most preference and debug changes you make, and some state things like login name last used, noob dialogs already displayed, etc. Sometimes beta and RC builds are misconfigured so that they use the main settings.xml, and there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth when this happens and stuff gets overwritten.

After that is the settings_per_account.xml, this holds relatively few things: Flags and paths for chat logs, last logoff, busy message, not too much else. Quite a few things like those noob dialogs maybe should be per user but they aren't. I haven't seen any nice clean documentation for what LL likes to think of as "per user", it's a grep-through-the-source exercise to see what gets stored where.

overrides.xml is something you would manually edit and drop in the same folder as settings_per_user, it can contain the same entries from any of the foregoing *.xml files. If you use a lot of different viewer versions, you can load this manually from the debug menu to quickly get your custom settings the way you want them. It's not especially convenient, but the chore may pay off if you play with a lot of different viewers. Settings that do different things across versions will make this less fun to use.

There are even more settings (IM to email, adult/mature/PG access, a big handful more) that are stored in the avatar's server-side profile. The preferences UI glosses over this difference, you have to find out again through trial and error or slogging through the sources.

And there are obsolete settings that no longer do anything but still get written out and show up in the debug menu, and little of this is really documented either. Font settings in 1.23 are a good example of these ill-documented changes, there are now do-nothing settings.xml values and the real settings moved to skin files.

Can you just copy the proper settings.xml (after a succesful exit from Second Life) and name the copy overrides.xml?

I guess you could just do a straight copy, but that might get frustrating if you have something like a graphics setting or window position that works in one viewer and not another, or want to keep caches separate, etc. It's worth the trouble to go through the key/map pairs and keep only the ones you know you will always want to change.

The old style files from before the xml era were a lot easier for me to understand and edit.

I don't suppose there's such a thing as a special purpose viewer & editor for xml files that displays them more like a spreadsheet, is there?

Only one in that list is free. The Sourceforge project page for it at http://xml-copy-editor.sourceforge.net/ . The download url is https://sourceforge.net/projects/xml-copy-editor/files/.

There are rpm files for Linux versions dated 2009, but the Windows installer appears to have been last updated in 2006.

My understanding, or more likely misunderstanding, is that one might need a thing called an XSLT file - an acronym that has nothing to do with SL, despite the misleading presence of the letters SL in the middle - in order for the editor to process the xml files properly.

I'm aware that one can edit the xml files with a text editor. I find all the padding and filler and computer-useful information a bit tedious to look at.

XML is evil, nasty, rude, but everything uses it so it's pretty much universal these days.

Many programmer text editors have XML modes, I use Smultron on the Mac to edit XML files with syntax coloring.

XSL Transforms are kind of like a simple macro language for XML to convert one XML file to another. They couldn't be harder to work with if they tried.

i use one called 'xml notepad' that was free, although it doesnt have the spreadsheet-like view you like.
eta: xml notepad is in that list as well, marked as 'proprietary', so proprietary is not necessarily something that isnt free.

To really do it right you kind of want a DTD. There is one for LLSD, but most (all?) of LL's XML files omit the doctype, so editors that rely on that will struggle.

You can live without XSLT as long as the editor brings along a reasonable default style.

One editor you can try is Serna, it was a commercial product but they have an open source version now that seems to work okay.

http://www.syntext.com/downloads/serna-free/

This one will open up more than one XML file at once, it's a tabbed interface, I'd kind of prefer windowed for moving stuff between files. You can shift-click a map and key from the left-hand column, then copy and paste into another settings file. Pick "Edit attributes" from the toolbar, and it's reasonably OK for changing values in the right-hand pane.

Lightly tested it seems to save XML that SL can handle. It doesn't seem to be into making automatic backups.

It's better than eating ground glass, but I'm not sure if for SL it's really an improvement over using a text editor.