[qutebrowser] Is there a way to prevent qutebrowser from re-writing my configuration file?

[Florian Bruhin]

Hey Nishant,

On Sun, Apr 02, 2017 at 02:52:40PM -0500, Nishant Rodrigues wrote:
> Is there a way to prevent automatic writing to the main configuration file?

:set general auto-save-config can help a bit, but IIRC it'll still get
overwritten if there are settings which aren't in the qutebrowser config
file yet (e.g. after an upgrade).

> If not, would you'll accept patches that allow this behaviour?

The bad news: no ;-)

The good news: The current config code is probably one of the oldest
parts of qutebrowser still existing nowadays (from January 2014 or so),
and is soon getting a complete makeover. See more details in these
issues:

https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/499
https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/milestone/7

This has been cooking for a while, but it's going to be a bigger change
(and also mean releasing qutebrowser v1.0, with an incompatible config).

However, I'm currently planning qutebrowser's second crowdfunding (watch
this mailinglist for the annoucement around easter!) so I can work
full-time for a month on this and other things related to v1.0.

Notably, qutebrowser's automatic config file (controlled via :set or the
qute:settings page) and the (optional) hand-edited config file will be
two completely separate files.

> What modifications are made to the configuration when it's written to?

If a setting qutebrowser knows about is missing in the file, or
something gets changed via :set, or something needs to be updated due to
config format changes in qutebrowser, it's simply completely rewritten.
(As said: currently. No, I'm not happy with it.)

Florian

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