Any ideas on how to carry over customizations in a better way with new versions?

John TeSelle

 I am a long-time BricsCad user.  With every major upgrade (and many minor ones) I have to manually re-do or copy over some customizations that I have.  These fall into three types:

- Changes to command aliases that are in default.pgp

- Changes to some hotkeys available in the Customze > Keyboard dialog box

- Changes to all settings in the "Settings" dialog box.

The default.pgp file seems to get replace regularly when BCAD updates.  I have a copy in another directory, and I then replace the new version with my old copy.  Is there a better way?  Is there some "user" .pgp file that could be made to load after the default.pgp and supercede certain settings?  This seems like an awkward way to handle updates.

The hotkeys seem to need updating less regularly, but still it happens.  Again, any way to work around this?

Finally, the "Settings" dialog settings need to be re-done only very rarely.  But what a pain.  When I upgraded just recently to v13, I was able Export settings, but then you can't import them in V13!  So what is the point of exporting.  I had to re-do every one of them.  Is there some better method that I am missing?

Perhaps the best solution would be a tool or feature built into BCAD that would migrate all these things over automatically.  I wonder if that is possible or if it could be done as an add-on.

Thanks for any suggestions or clarifications that people could provide on this.

Robt Deans

When you first launch the program after update, you should be presented with the Bricscad user file manager, advising that "An update of customizable user files is available...list of files containing changes which will be overwritten"
You are given the option of overwriting or keeping existing files (one of which is default.pgp).

martin@enco.us

I keep a text file that includes my customizations for the pgp file.  I paste that to the bottom of default.pgp when Bricscad overwrites that file.  Reusing an old default.pgp means any new additions by Bricscad are lost.

Jason Bourhill

John,

I would recommend that you take a look at the User Profile Manager, which is a separate utility available from the Bricsys group under windows start menu. This allows you to create, import, and export user profiles containing all your BricsCAD settings. I have some info on doing this here:
http://www.cadconcepts.co.nz/creating-a-new-user-profile/

Creating your own profile allows you to setup BricsCAD how you like, and to point to your own locations for customisation files, such as the default.pgp. Keeping you customisation in a different location to the default will avoid then being accidentally overwritten when you apply updates or upgrades.

I have and example of sample CAD Library here (note this expects the 32bit version of BricsCAD):
http://www.cadconcepts.co.nz/sample-cad-library-v13/
This CAD Library can be installed in a location of your choosing. The folder structure I've used may give you some ideas for your own setup.

Regards,

Jason Bourhill

CAD Concepts

Patrik Sparrman

I have now tried to use the Profile manager to transfer settings between computers. This hits a problem as a lot of info sits in C:/Users/NAME/Appdata....... where NAME is different in all computers. Unfortunately the name from the first setup computer is inserted into all consequent computers. this applies to for example paths. Finding faults in settings stemming from the .arg file is almosta as painful as doing it manually.  Also I have both XP and and W7 Machines and they dont handle users the same way at all. ( Documents and settings/user/NAME/......) . Some customization is done in the default.pgp and that is a pain to remember everytime. This needs to be looked over.

Alexander Van Heuverzwyn

BricsCAD supports the use of environment variables in userprofiles. So if you have a registryfile where %username% or %userprofile% is used in paths, then these paths become transferrable between users and machines. If you use %userprofile% you can accommodate for differences between operating systems. Windows XP used 'c:\documents and settings' instead of 'c:\users'. The pgp file can't handle environment variables yet though.

martin@enco.us

I fixed the problem with the .pgp file by adding code to my on_doc_load.lsp file to assign aliases.  An example would be

(defun c:AP () (command "APPLOAD"))

I think Microsoft made a less than stellar decision when they made the default for Windows (Win7 64 bit  in our office) be roaming profiles.  I have a folder named C:\CADmaster\ set up on each computer here that holds the support files we use.  We make the necessary changes in Settings>Settings to point to that folder instead of the default locations.  It is far easier and far faster to navigate to C:\CADmaster\ than to navigate to C:\Users\Martin\AppData\Roaming\Bricsys\Bricscad\V13x64\en_US\Support\.

When I copy a profile to a different computer I use a word processor on the .arg file to find /NAME/ (in Patrik's example) and replace it with the appropriate name on the new computer.

Patrik Sparrman

Alexander is this not something the installationprogram should handle or how do I get my registryfile to act like that.

Martin I Think I will go for a master for the time being. I actually moved my settings outside the V13... path otherwise I hade to reconfigure withe every release.