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2.2.1. Preferences File Format

While we recommend using the graphical preferences manager to alter preferences, some users may wish to edit the underlying text files directly.

The preferences file format consists of a series of sections separated by bracketed headers. Currently the only valid section is [user-preferences] for the file in the User Settings Directory or [extra-preferences] for files passed on the command line with the --prefs-file option. All other sections are ignored.

The body of each section is a sequence of lines, each of which is a name=value pair.

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.personality defines the source editor's runtime personality).

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.