Cannot restore/recover backed up settings

[Brian Hart]

Hi!  I've used QS for a long time now and I've recently got a new Macbook Pro to setup.  This is a separate work computer so I don't want to use migration assistant to just copy my whole home folder over so I'm trying to cherry pick what I want to restore.  QS is one of those things.  I've backed up the ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver folder and the com.blacktree.Quicksilver.plist from my other Mac and have tried multiple times to restore them on the new one.  It appears that after I copy them as soon as I launch QS it replaces the plist file and doesn't maintain my preferences.  I cannot for the life of me figure out why it is doing this.  Does anybody have any ideas or suggestions as to what I may be missing or maybe a better process for restoring preferences?

Thank you!

Brian Hart

[Jon Stovell]

Actually, you really don't want to migrate QS's entire application support folder and settings anyway. 

The one thing that you probably do want to do is copy over your plugins and any custom actions you might have created. For the plugins, just copy the contents of ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Plugins on your old computer onto the desktop of your new computer, and then open them. QS will automatically install them. For your custom actions (if any), just copy them from ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions on your old computer to the same folder on your new computer, and then restart QS.

Everything else in QS's application support and its preferences plist is stuff you don't want to bring with you. You see, QS very, very much tailors itself to the specific computer that it is running on. The catalogue inventories the items on that specific computer. The ranking of objects and items sorts itself based on what you do with that specific computer. Etc.

Since you are not using Migration Assistant, the catalogue on your old computer would be 100% wrong if used on your new computer (and even if you did use Migration Assistant, a significant portion of the catalogued items would still be wrong). Moreover, since this will be a separate work computer, you'll be using it to do different tasks than your old computer. Therefore, the actions and objects you most frequently use are bound to be different, so you won't want to have the same ranking anyway.

[Jon Stovell]

P.S.: I speak from experience. Back when I was fairly new to QS, I migrated from one computer to another. I read some online advice telling me the same things that I just told you. I disregarded that advice and tried to copy over all of QS's support files anyway. The result was a mess. :)

[Etienne Samson]

Sorry, I beg to differ ;-).

Application Support contains the catalog's structure, as well as the mnemonics (the shortcuts learnt by QS while you use it), so you might want to preserve that, and it should* work. The part about actions is true. Plugins can be downloaded so they're not as critical.

> It appears that after I copy them as soon as I launch QS it replaces the plist file and doesn't maintain my preferences.

I think what you're seeing is that (since 10.9 IIRC) the defaults system uses in-memory storage, and only saves/load from files on login/logout (or Magic™, it doesn't really matter). Since the defaults system "thinks" it doesn't know about QS yet because it's not in its memory storage, it replaces the file with a brand new version.

You should be able to load your old plist file into the defaults system using Terminal :
$ defaults import com.blacktree.Quicksilver ~/path/to/com.blacktree.Quicksilver.plist

And that should fix the preferences being erased.

*YMMV, as Jon implies. It may be possible to get back in shape, you will likely end up with broken catalog entries, triggers, and after a rescan, most of the catalog should be renewed, and invalid/non-existent entries will not work, so you'll have some cleanup to do.

Regards,
Etienne Samson
--
samson....@gmail.com

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[1.61803]

On Saturday, August 20, 2016 at 1:59:57 AM UTC+2, Etienne wrote:

You should be able to load your old plist file into the defaults system using Terminal :
$ defaults import com.blacktree.Quicksilver ~/path/to/com.blacktree.Quicksilver.plist

Before downgrading from 10.9 I used to run

$ killall -u <username> cfprefsd

Out of curiosity, does/shouldn't QS verify the catalog against your computer's UUID? 

[Brian Hart]

Thanks for the suggestions and feedback guys!  Not sure why, but neither of these options are working.  I tried to purge the files again and copy over my backed up versions and run the defaults import command.  No dice.  Tried doing it again with the killall suggestion for good measure before running it.  Still no good.

I exit quicksilver before trying these suggestions and then open it and find it isn't loading my preferences, enabled plugins, etc.  Very frustrating.  I know I COULD set it up again but every time I do that it always takes a while for me to get everything exactly the same.  It seems like there should be a way to export/import these settings to make it compatible.  I'm not worried about maintaining the catalog between the systems but custom triggers and plugins and such would be nice to export and import.  

Anyway, guess I'm stuck just setting it all up manually.  Thanks for the effort all!  Appreciate it!

[Rob McBroom]

On 22 Aug 2016, at 21:23, Brian Hart wrote:

Thanks for the suggestions and feedback guys!  Not sure why, but neither of these options are working.

One more idea…

With Quicksilver shut down, copy your old plist to ~/Library/Preferences, then go to Terminal and

defaults read com.blacktree.Quicksilver

That should show all your old settings on the screen, but as a side effect, it will hopefully force the preferences system to load them. Then, try launching QS again.

--
Rob McBroom
http://www.skurfer.com/

[Brian Hart]

That sounded like a really good idea! But no dice. :/ Sincerely
appreciate the suggestions though! Thank you!

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