Rhino WIP Feature: Transfer Settings

Serengeti (Rhino WIP)
1

Transfer settings between Rhino easily cross platform

We’re excited to introduce 3 new commands

  • ExportSettings
  • ImportSettings
  • ImportPreviousSettings

We hope these new commands can make backing up settings, moving computers and distributing Rhino settings to your colleagues, students and friends easier.

  • Export Settings - Exports a .rhs file full of Rhino settings.

  • Import Settings - Imports an .rhs file

  • ImportPreviousSettings - Allows users to easily import settings from older Rhino installs

Which Settings are included?

  • Window Layouts
  • Keyboard Shortcuts
  • Aliases
  • Plug-ins
  • Schemes
  • Default RUIs
  • Advanced Settings
  • Window Positions
  • Rhino Options

Which are not (currently)?

  • Custom RUIs

Data safety

All of the above commands (should) create backups of everything they replace, so you should never lose any data whilst using them. Having the files bundled up as .rhs also makes backing up easier. (This is of course the Rhino WIP and this release is the first round of external testing!)

.rhs files

.rhs files can be dragged and dropped onto Rhino instead of using the command
.rhs RHino Settings files are a simple renamed zip. you can rename them back to .zip and unzip them as necessary.

Please try these commands out and let us know of any issues.

18 Likes
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Which setting is the one many users might need the most ?

  • Custom RUIs

…just sayin’

3 Likes
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One can imagine that the items currently implemented are best understood and thus more easily debuggable, so they are the best ones to start with in the first round. Once everyone is comfortable with these then the one that would be the main reason for the feature in the first place can be introduced for debugging?

Here’s hoping you can get to custom RUIs quickly, Callum! It’s great that you’ve started.

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Bingo.

Creating small prototypes gives invaluable feedback, and the smaller and faster we can prototype and iterate, the sooner and better we can make the most important and needed things.

:crossed_fingers:

Agreed. But no need to block the existing feature set for this. Part of the motivation for this is teachers and tech support. For them everything it currently does is already very useful. It’s also helping me improving cross-platform setting compatibility.

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will these be compatible with rhino for windows and mac ?
in the classroom - do i need to provide 1 file for both systems ?
or 2: setting win, setting mac ?

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Hi Tom -

They should be. If you find that not to be the case, we’d need to get that .rhs file.
-wim

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can t test - no wip on intel - sorry

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The goal is 1 file.

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9

Can you make it behave like .3dm template on a server? I put my .rhs there and i gets read on startup? Importing / Exporting on several system could get annoying fast. Overall a welcome improvement.

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:heart: :heart: :heart:

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That is an interesting idea. Can you tell me more about how you’d use this? I’m assuming you want to deploy a template company-wide?

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Rhino WIP Features
12

Yes, this is basically the idea. Currently I use multiple 3 PCs (Workstation at Office, Workstation at Home, Laptop). The default template, heavily customized to my needs is sitting on the server and gets synced across all devices. Sometimes i also tweak settings, that are not stored in the *.3dm file and need to be transfered manually.

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Ideally you’d sync to your Rhino user account really, it sounds like you want to share settings with yourself.

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Is this an option? Never seen it.

The best option and most flexible option in my opinion would be: I can enter a path to an .rhs file in every .3dm (template)-file and achieve per project settings. If none is provided, use the global *.rhs. For one use-case I might use this layout, for another use-case I use that layout.

With this approach you can work with yourself or distribute settings in a company-context.

Transfer V8 macOS settings to V8 Windows users
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Not currently. More flexibility would be great though.

2 Likes
16

Is the plan to also incorporate Grasshopper settings, plugins, etc.?

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Great question,

On Mac I believe this will be included as it’s in the GH Plug-ins folder. Windows has these settings in the %appdata% so not currently. But that sounds like a handy feature.

1 Like
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I just installed the latest WIP on two different machines, and whenever I try this feature I get this:

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(I also note that you’re not allowed to name or choose where the settings file will be exported to…)

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Yes, once you import you must restart Rhino.

Not yet but I’ll add this soon :slight_smile:

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Well, I don’t think I would have made the post unless I had restarted and checked that nothing changed. But even so, that “no changes to settings will be saved” is super confusing wording!

Wait, is this why I don’t see any visible change? Does this mean that none of my custom toolbars with custom commands, scripts and icons transfer over? If so then I really don’t see the point of this feature so far.

EDIT: But wait, “default RUI” is included? If that means the default toolbars, why do they need to be included? Is that so you can keep your V9 toolbars when upgrading to V10 in the future? Should that not be the other way around? Like, you want to transfer your custom settings to V10, but you want to also get the new features in the new default toolbars for that version, right?

(And personally, since I have replaced icons even in the default toolbars, I’d love to see some sort of icon theme get taken into account here too… though I guess that’s out of scope.)