[Chimera-users] disabling previous state

[Elaine Meng]

Hi David,
Most preferences (the ones that show up in the Preferences dialog) don’t save unless you actually click Save on the Preferences dialog.  However, there are some other things like recent files/directories, ribbon styles, and Multalign Viewer settings that save instantly.  In that case, some ways to prevent saving are:

(1) have an unwriteable preferences file (on mac or linux, “chmod” the preferences file to be unwriteable).  In that case you will always get a (possibly annoying) message upon startup that the preferences are not writeable.

(2) have a file of the preferences you want to keep “forever” and automatically copy it to the working preferences file whenever you start up Chimera.  I do this with aliased commands on mac (and you could do something similar on linux) because I have different sets of preferences that I use for different situations.  So on my system I could alias “start1” to copy a particular file to another filename and then start up Chimera using that copy (not the original) as the preferences.  In that case, you are not actually preventing saving, but whenever you start up, it wipes out the copy that had been changed and restores it to the pristine state. 

An example of such an alias in my mac .tcshrc file (all one line):

alias demo1 "cd ~/Desktop/demo1; \cp -f prefs.demo1 preferences; ~/Desktop/Chimera.app/Contents/MacOS/chimera"

These are both unix-y approaches.  I am not adept with windows so I can’t speak to how you would handle it on that system.

You can totally wipe out everything in the preferences file by deleting that file (when you are not running Chimera).  
You can see filename/location of the file that is being used as the preferences  and reset the settings that appear in the Preferences dialog with Chimera menu: Favorites… Preferences, category Preferences.  
<http://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/UsersGuide/preferences.html>
<http://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/UsersGuide/preferences.html#Preferences>
… remember to Save after resetting.

You can specify using a particular file as the preferences at the time of startup with a startup option
<http://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/UsersGuide/startup.html>
<http://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/UsersGuide/options.html>

I hope this helps,
Elaine
-----
Elaine C. Meng, Ph.D.                       
UCSF Computer Graphics Lab (Chimera team) and Babbitt Lab
Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry
University of California, San Francisco

On Sep 2, 2016, at 1:43 PM, david gae <ddgae at ucdavis.edu> wrote:

> Dear Chimera Users, 
> 
> I am wondering if anyone can help me with this question: 
> 
> Whenever I start up CHIMERA. My previous settings and panels show up. Is there a way to prevent my previous preferences being saved? 
> 
> Thanks,
> David