[GSoC] Should GUI preferences be saved to the workspace?

• May 22, 2018 - 18:00

As part of my workspace expansion for GSoC 2018, I was thinking of adding GUI based preferences to the workspace as to allow customization between workspaces.
There are a few of options for this:
1. Each workspace has its own set of preferences (including Basic and Advanced)
2. Basic and Advanced share a set of preferences and only new workspaces get their own
3. All workspaces share preferences unless specified elsewhere (such as a checkbox in preferences)

So, should GUI preferences be saved to the workspace? If so, in what way? If not, why?


Comments

My sense is that "usually" if I change a preference, I want it to apply to all workspaces, but "sometimes" I might want a preference to be specific to a workspace. For the most part, that distinction is likely to be the same as non-GUI / GUI (non-GUI changes are global, GUI changes are workspace-specific) but that's just a gut feel.

FWIW, I've been using OBS Studio lately for creating videos, and it has a model of different "profiles" of settings, ewhich are kind of / sort of like workspaces but are more about settings than GUI. Still, they seem to have a done a decent job of figuring out which settings I probably want to be global and which I want to be profile-specific, to the point where I haven't really investigated to see how it works - I've just been pleased that it works, a least so far.

By the way, saaving preferences to the workspaces would be easily done by replacing the common

 settings.beginGroup(objectName()); 
with
settings.beginGroup($workspaceName + objectName()); 

In reply to by ecstrema

Which technically wouldn't save them in the workspace at all, but still inside the normal global settings file, just with a workspace name as part of the key..
While it does allow you to then have that setting "linked" to that workspace, it in no way helps at all when distributing the workspace itself...

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