Let's FINALLY fix Editor Preferences in UE5

[midgunner66]

Never thought this stuff was a problem, nor are these things hard to find out:

@Greendale_AB

Not only is this crazy, it’s also undocumented. There is a long help page for Editor Preferences that doesn’t even mention how preferences are saved.

@Greendale_AB

Nor does it explain how “defaults” work or where they are stored. Like how if you change something and click “Reset to Defaults” nothing will happen unless you’ve previously used “Set as Default”. The so called default doesn’t actually have default values.

They’re all stored in your project directory. Read further for editor defaults.

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@Rawalanche

I remember last time I tried to migrate Editor Preferences between the projects using the Import/Export buttons instead of manually copying and pasting the ini files around

Just tested in UE5, it worked for me. You need to make sure to import them into the same category you exported them from; the files are named *Category* Backup Date.ini, and it looks like it only stores the settings for the category you export from.

@Rawalanche

It’s about time we finally get proper Editor Preferences handling that are actually saved within the editor installation (in the operating system user account scope, to be more precise), not with the projects.

You do that by editing the editor config files:

Those circled dates are the date I modified it. To test it, in BaseEditorPerProjectUserSettings.ini, I changed bShowFriendlyNames to false, made a new project, and it was set to false by default. Though, this will only work for projects made after the change; these are the notes as to why:

; -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
; IMPORTANT:  EditorPerProjectUserSettings.ini has special behavior!
;
; This .ini file contains the defaults for many editor and engine "preferences".  These preferences
; are saved to an EditorPerProjectUserSettings.ini file in the user's /<Game>/Saved/Config/ directory. 
;
; If you change the default for a preference in here, that change will *NOT* automatically 
; propagate to users who already have saved preferences.  The idea is that we must preserve
; their existing settings and never want to clobber entries in that file.
;
; If you add a new preference, the new key and value *WILL* be propagated to the user's
; EditorPerProjectUserSettings.ini file.  After we load the user's existing settings, we'll merge in
; any missing keys and values that are present in these defaults.
;
; One easy technique for forcing a "reset" of an already-existing preference is to simply
; rename the variable for that preference.  The config system will treat it as a newly-added
; key and will propagate the change to existing users' preferences.
; -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------