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From: Michael Gibson
Hi Pior, your described process is rather unusual, most people who run v5 just see their settings being used and just go ahead and use it the same as they were using v4.
I guess this has not come up often because the vast majority of people don't start out with the v5 beta by manually editing your moi.ini file and removing your customizations.
Also usually someone who wants to directly edit the moi.ini file will keep backup copies of it.
I'm sorry that you have run into this problem. But judging by the lack of similar problems over the years I don't think a warning is merited. That's because such a warning is not without cost, each chunk of text or UI that is not pertinent to the user contributes to complexity/"word salad" and makes other information a little harder to browse.
Thank you for your description of what you ran into though, it is very helpful for me to know what problems someone is experiencing. Then if I notice a trend where it's being encountered by many users that would make me re-evaluate some kind of change to avert it.
Thanks,
- Michael
From: pior (PIOR_O)
Hi there Michael !
Well, I am glad that at the very least I've managed to make my point clear. And even if, of course, completely wiping off preferences is not necessarily the way one would go at testing out a MOI beta, it still remains that deleting preferences is a *very* widespread way of making sure that one is working with a clean slate when testing something about a piece of software. Case in point : had I reverted my UI to default before starting this very thread (about the colored styles thing), I wouldn't have reported on an issue that wasn't a bug !
And of course I have no problem with making backups, I do it all the time for a lot of different things because I can't afford losing work. All I am saying (again) is that given how very unusual it is for a Vn piece of software to silently "backward change" user settings and hotkeys in the Vn-1 version (regardless of how well designed the shared file is), there should be at the very least *some* warning about it, as I can honestly say that I have never, ever run into this behavior before. Now how to communicate it with few words and in the best possible, non-intimidating way is a side topic, and an easily solved one IMHO. My suggestion of putting it in the popup about manual .ini editing is just *a* solution (and I believe the most logical one ...), but It doesn't have to be there literally - it just has to be somewhere commonly seen enough so that any user can know about it beforehand. The next best places would probably be as a warning during the installation process, or as a warning on first launch.
Also I think that this issue not being raised so far is just a chicken and egg kind of situation. I would think that the more "advanced" users are (say, in terms of hours spent with the software, as well as overall experience with tech in general counted in years), the less likely they would be fine with the idea of settings and hotkeys changed in V5 also retroactively affecting V4. But of course no one can be concerned about it if they don't know ... just like I wasn't concerned about it until two days ago :D
Also in the specific case of MOI, it is especially likely that one may be nervous about it because the most common way to use custom scripts/commands in MOI is through assigning said commands to hotkeys saved in the .ini, as it is often instructed here on this forum. Therefore the .ini stores more than just superficial user settings, it can also contain commands that can be essential to ones workflow.
(On a side note : storing scripts as hotkeys is what I used to do for a while, up until a few months ago when it became unsustainable. Therefore I started to create custom text buttons instead and it has made my workflow much better as it removes one layer of things to remember. So another unrelated suggestion on the overall topic of UX and user tweaks, would be to emphasize this feature more, as I am sure that many users who end up assigning many complex scripts to hotkeys might not even be aware that they can create handy little custom UI buttons instead, directly in Sidepane.htm. So perhaps there could be a dedicated .htm panel (stored in appdata, and ideally ... per-version of course !) made specifically for managing custom scripts and generating buttons for them).
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Now as previously said, I am in no position to request any change, nor I am hoping to. The spirit of my (lengthy) posts is to make my point absolutely clear and to not have it be misrepresented/misunderstood.
If anything, this could mean that perhaps user settings (like the various switches making the app behave one way or another) might have their place in a shared ini, but hotkeys and scripts might be worth storing in a different file per version, just like all other apps do.
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