Hi all,
Since transitioning to Rhino 8, it seems that every time an update becomes available all of my custom settings and Aliases get deleted. I’m wondering if there’s a way to recover these, and also wanted to continue to note it as it creates a bit of a hassle re-inputting the new ones I’ve created since the last time I exported my custom settings.
Thanks,
Paul
you can save your toolbars and your aliases.
I have mine saved in a dropbox so I can add them to any rhino anywhere as needed. ( i used to travel to client sites a lot, and was always lost without my hotkeys and toolbars.) Takes about 10 seconds to get back up and running-
Yes, but Rhino shouldn’t be doing that (deleting aliases and settings).
very much agreed… I am not seeing that behaviour here.
I’m wondering if we go with the nuclear option and run the reset command (factory defaults) close Rhino with file>exit, restore custom bits, then close again with file>exit
and restart… that may get us back you back to a stable update process.
I’ll give it a shot! Thanks Kyle
I have system backups. Does this mean that my custom toolbar is somewhere in a back up and I can recover it? I ask becasue, the recent update wiped out a custom toolbar that I’ve been tweaking and using for months.
It’s possible. Is your custom toolbar still in default or did you actually create a separate .rui for it?
So, here is the general procedure -
Make sure Rhino is closed.
In your backups, find a date before the settings got nuked.
In the backup, navigate to
C:\Users\<your username>\AppData\Roaming\McNeel\Rhinoceros\8.0
Inside that folder, copy the entire settings folder somewhere.
If you have made a custom .rui, in your backup it will be in
C:\Users\<your username>\AppData\Roaming\McNeel\Rhinoceros\8.0\UI
Make a copy of that file too.
Now, back in your computer (not the backup) navigate to the same folder -
C:\Users\<your username>\AppData\Roaming\McNeel\Rhinoceros\8.0
Rename the settings folder there to something like settings-old
Put the copy of the settings folder you made from your backup in the same directory
(make sure it’s still named settings)
If you had a custom .rui, go to
C:\Users\<your username>\AppData\Roaming\McNeel\Rhinoceros\8.0\UI
Rename the original custom .rui to something like xxx.rui.old
Put the copy of the .rui from your backup in that folder.
Now, start Rhino. If all has gone well, it should look like it did before the settings were nuked.
Most excellent. Thank you. That took care of it. The primary icons for the tools are there but there are a ton of gray circles with an ‘x’ in them that I can’t figure out how to delete. No problem, I’ll work on that and can live with it. I just needed my beloved set of tools. 
Now that I know what an ‘rui’ is, I’ll set things us differently so I can recover from updates without disasters.
Thanks again, you saved me and educated me… Always more to learn, right?
That means that the images got nuked when the .rui was saved at some point - a serious bug which was only fixed in a recent SRC. The settings restore should have fixed that anyway, but maybe they got nuked before your restore point.
There are some more important changes/bugfixes relative to this coming up shortly.
Completely understand. Not a problem… Thanks again…
Normally to fix a button image, for each button, Shift+Right click to edit, open the button editor and hit File>Import (for a custom .svg image you might have created) or File>Import standard Rhino image… to get into the library of standard icons for V8. You cannot import bitmap (jpg/png) images in V8.
If you want a completely blank button (get rid of the gray circle) , use one of the tools to scribble something in the image editor, then go to Edit>Clear. You will then have a “No-image” button.
If you had an .rui that was made in V7 and the original bitmaps are gone, I think you’re out of luck getting them back without re-opening the original .rui from V7.
Not intending to keep eating up your time but if what I’m hearing is correct, there are not ‘.rui’ files anymore with V8. That was a V7 implementation? If so, I nuked V7 over the past couple of days now that I have V8 running well. I have images of my system from a few days ago. I might go look for those V7 ‘rui’ files and put them back to see what happens.
Thanks for the info.
No, that’s not exactly correct - .rui files still exist in V8.
The difference is that in V7 and earlier, the only place toolbars resided was in an .rui file (we’re talking Windows Rhino here, not Mac). You could actually have multiple .rui’s and any or all of them open at once. The default toolset was default.rui which could then be modified, renamed etc. If you closed all the .rui’s there were no toolbars at all. Any changes/modifications to the toolbars were stored in the .rui itself.
In V8, what was default.rui is now integrated into Rhino. There no longer is a default.rui, nor do you need it to run Rhino. You can modify the default toolset as you want, the modifications are stored in the settings files.
However you can create one or more new .rui’s as additional toolsets in V8 and have it/them open at the same time as the default toolset. And, you can open .rui files that were made in V7.
The design of the system was however that any changes made to the .rui’s were not directly stored in the .rui’s themselves, but rather in additional settings files. The settings files with changes were updated in real-time, but not automatically saved to the .rui’s. There was a command to save those settings changes back to the .rui, but there were a number of serious bugs in the system. One of the bugs (now fixed) was that when saving an .rui, the images got nuked.
As far as I know we’re going back to the system where changes to a custom user-made .rui will be automatically saved back to the .rui itself and so we should no longer need to deal with these problems. I think most of that will be done for 8.6.
Note there is a fundamental incompatibility of V7 .rui files and V8 .rui files. The icon images have changed from bitmap (raster) to vector. V8 seems to be able to read the V7 raster images in .rui based toolbars as long as you just leave them be, but you cannot edit them in the V8 button editor. At the beginning I had so many problems I ended up giving up on using a V7 .rui and made all my stuff from scratch in V8.
What is possible is that you should now be able to open an .rui made in Windows Rhino in Mac Rhino - and vice-versa. That was not possible previously.
Excellent base knowledge info. Thank you.
I just updated to 8.8.24142.13001 (service release candidate, automatically downloaded)… and lost all my settings. I know how to get them back and it’s not a huge deal, but just wanted to make folks aware that this is still a potential issue. Highly recommend _optionsExport before any update.