Preferences File Format

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While we recommend using the preferences dialog to alter preferences, some users may wish to edit the underlying text files manually.

The preferences file format consists of a series of sections separated by bracketed headers such as [user-preferences]. These headers are used internally to identify the file from which a value was read, when there are multiple preferences files active.

The body of each section is a sequence of lines, each of which is a name=value pair. All of these are read in from each preferences file, with later like-named settings overwriting earlier ones.

Each preference name is in domain.preference form, where domain is the IDE subsystem affected and preference is the name of the specific preference (for example, edit.tab-size defines the source editor's tab size).

Preference values can be any Python expression that will evaluate to a number, string, tuple, list, or dictionary. The data type is defined by each preference and will be verified as the file is read into Wing. Long lines may be continued by placing a backslash (\\) at the end of a line and comments may be placed anywhere on a line by starting them with #.

If you wish to write preferences files by hand, refer to the Preferences Reference for documentation of all available preferences.