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[John Ralls]

On Oct 20, 2013, at 6:33 PM, Mike Alexander <mta at umich.edu> wrote:

> --On October 20, 2013 7:39:49 AM -0700 John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:
> 
>>> I'm running the X11 version of GnuCash on MacOSX.  Does anyone know
>>> where the preferences are stored in that environment?  I can't find
>>> them and I can't find any recently changed file that might contain
>>> them.  When I try to look at them with the gsettings command, I seem
>>> to get the default values, but GnuCash manages to get the correct
>>> current values.
>> 
>> See if ~/Library/Preferences/org.gnucash.Gnucash.plist exists. If it
>> does, the gsettings is using defaults.
> 
> That file doesn't exist, but /Users/mta/Library/Preferences/gnucash.plist does and contains the prefs.  This file is very strange.  I didn't find it last night because its Spotlight information is incomplete so that it can't be found by any Spotlight search.  I'm not sure why it's like this, but there are other files in my Preferences directory that are similar so it's probably not an issue.
> 
> GSettings is using the defaults mechanism, in particular the NSUserDefaults class.  It took me a while to find this since the backend is called GNextstepSettingsBackend.  Apparently nothing much has changed since the Next Step days.  It calls "[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults]" to initialize things and according to the documentation this creates a defaults object using the application's bundle ID.  GnuCash has no bundle ID when running as an X11 application.  It looks like it is using the command name instead.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that nothing has changed since the NextStep days, and GSettings is only a couple of years old. I think it's more about William Hua having a weird sense of humor.

The filename difference is probably because under MacPorts there's no Info.plist with a CFBundleIdentifier. The file itself is a perfectly ordinary compressed plist. Open it in Xcode.

Regards,
John Ralls