How to export/import app configuration and restore a previous configuration?

[KrzysztofPrzygoda]

There could be various formats available:

1. YAML or JSON. Possible to save and load via GUI and CLI.
2. CLI commands set (Bash script). Possible to save via GUI and CLI.

This would allow to edit, store and apply different configs in- and outside of the app as well as speed up CLI commands creation.

[waydabber]

Not sure about this. This is a rather advanced feature and those who need it can already do it easily as the app is designed to store everything in the user defaults in standard plist binary XML format which can be exported/imported at will.

To export all settings:

defaults export pro.betterdisplay.BetterDisplay ./betterdisplay.plist

To import all settings (while the app is not running):

defaults import pro.betterdisplay.BetterDisplay ./betterdisplay.plist

To reset defaults (while the app is not running):

defaults delete pro.betterdisplay.BetterDisplay

Please note that for in order for export/import to work properly the display's identifiers (UUIDs) must match unless the identification method was changed to something else. So by default import/export works on the same macOS installation only.

[waydabber]

(also note that using defaults export/import is better than trying to save and overwrite app settings under ~/Library/Preferences because of caching - simply overwriting the settings file might not work as expected).

[alankritjoshi]

I often share configs across different macs: macbook, mini, work macbook, etc. It would be great if a declarative config file (~/.config/...) could be made to derive the settings from. The plist method creates a binary of 15k size (which is a lot to commit to git in my dotfiles repo) and doesn't work properly across devices.

BTW: I love this app! Thanks for making this.

[waydabber]

Hi @alankritjoshi - the plist is essentially XML - it just has a binary compressed format. You can however easily convert between XML and binary variants:

plutil -convert xml1 binarySettings.plist

plutil -convert binary1 xmlSettings.plist

Transporting settings from one system to an other is possible, the only challange is that the display identifier UUID is system specific. You can however change/edit this UUID in the config file when transferring between systems (or change identification method inside the app before exporting).

[alankritjoshi]

Ah got it! Thanks for your explanation!

[waydabber]

https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay/wiki/Export-and-import-app-settings