Where is kdiff3 settings file is stored?

[kobygold]

Hi,

Where can I find the kdiff3 settings file on MacOS?
I searched the documentation but couldn’t find it.

I saw that older kdiff versions (up to v0.9.98) had it in file ~/.kdiff3rc
I found this file on my system, but it looks like it doesn’t affect anything, so it looks like a leftover from older kdiff3 v0.9.98 I’ve installed before on my system.

v0.9.98 is obsolete, and is not maintained anymore, and has crashing issues on MacOS, so when I found the latest release (currently v1.12.1) I moved to that.
But I can’t find it’s settings file… Hoping it still has a text settings file…

Thanks,
Koby

[forumcontributer]

Have you checked ~/.local/share and ~/.config dirs?

[kobygold]

Hi @forumcontributer,
The two directories you listed have few other applications’ dirs inside, but not kdiff3…

[johnandmegh]

Hi - I don’t know about MacOS specifically, but on my Fedora Linux system the KDiff3 settings file is ~/.config/kdiff3rc - it’s just a file in that overall ~/.config/ directory, rather than an entire subdirectory.

[kobygold]

Hi @johnandmegh,
Thanks, but the ~/.config/ directory doesn’t have that kdiff3rc on my Mac… see screenshot.

Just to verify, which kdiff3 version do you have?

Thanks,
Koby

[johnandmegh]

I’m on 1.12.1 just like you - hmm, there must be some Mac-specific location that applications are encouraged to use.

Perhaps you could discover it by adapting the method used here:

Backup custom application launcher entries

you can save a change to the launcher and then look to see which files recently changed… then back up the file that captured the change. from my notes #to find the last 10 recently changed files from a config change or fat fingered file save find -type f -printf '%T@ %p\n' | sort -n | tail -10 i find it handy to make an alias for this in my profile so it’s always handy.

But with changing a KDiff3 setting instead?

[kobygold]

Thanks John,
I tried that “find” command, but sadly the “-printf” option is not supported on MacOS…

Thanks,
Koby

[forumcontributer]

Try this

find ~ -iname "*kdiff*"

[meven]

On mac the path are different.

The source of truth is QStandardPaths Class | Qt Core 6.8.2

So probably in ~/Library/Application Support/ kdiff3 subdirectory for you.

[kobygold]

Hi @meven,
I found the kdiff3 file in the path you wrote:
/Library/Application Support/kdiff3/kdiff3staterc

However the file doesn’t include the settings I was looking for…
I was looking for the color settings to create color themes (the app has about 10-15 different colors), but they don’t exist in this file…
Many other settings are missing from this file, it looks different.

The file is called: “kdiff3staterc”, so could this “state” be something different than app config/settings?

Hi @forumcontributer,
I tried your search command. It takes very longs to search the entire Mac. I will let it run and see later if It finds relevant files.

Thanks,
Koby

[kobygold]

BTW, I saw that kdiff3 has a command line option to print to console all it’s settings, and to load them from a given file. This potentially could be a good solution to backup and change color schemes. However this feature seem to have a bug in the colors: all colors are presented with a single number instead of 3 numbers (R,G,B). So I can’t save the current colors, and won’t be able to load different colors…

The Color numbers looks like the first number from each color, i.e. Red only…

[kobygold]

Hi guys,
After an exhaustive search using @forumcontributer tip,
I finally found the settings file!
It is located here on MacOS:

/Users/<user name>/Library/Preferences/kdiff3rc

Thank you all guys for you help!
Koby