Saving your settings

The difference between 'Save Item' and 'Save Profile'
In the top left of the setting editor (the window that pops up when you click 'Triggers', 'Aliases' or 'Settings' etc on the main toolbar), you can see a toolbar with a row of buttons. Two of those buttons are 'Save Item' and 'Save Profile', which have subtly different functionality.Firstly, 'Save Item' will save the currently open setting, saving the current settings into RAM, the working memory of Mudlet. Secondly, the 'Save Profile' button saves the current in-memory settings by writing them to a file on your hard drive.

The difference is, if you only 'Save Item' and Mudlet crashes (which it can, on occasion) your progress will be lost, as the new settings are only stored in the applications running memory, which upon crash, is lost. When you write to disk, your changes persist if Mudlet crashes.

PLEASE NOTE: The 'Save Profile' button DOES NOT also do the job of 'Save Item', meaning if you change a setting and only click 'Save Profile', it will save the working memory as it is, without the new setting change - so if Mudlet crashes and you don't save again before quitting, that change won't be saved to disk.

When and how to save
Knowing what we do now, it is important to properly save after a few changes are made (or more importantly, after you have done an amount of work you would be upset to lose!). To save correctly, click 'Save Item' and then 'Save Profile' each time you want to ensure your latest settings are saved to disk.

How Mudlet saves and where it saves to
As we learnt in the Mudlet setup tutorial, Mudlet saves its files (in Windows, anyhow) to a ".config" folder inside your user folder. Inside that there is a folder for profiles and there should now be one with the same name as your connection name. For instance, if your connection name was "Avalon_RPG" as it was in my screenshot, your folder path should look like this: "C:\Users\Shakralay\.config\mudlet\profiles\Avalon_RPG".

All your settings, packages, logs, and other data Mudlet saves about your connection, will be saved inside that folder. As it pertains to your settings, Mudlet saves all your current settings into a single xml file, with the name being the current date and time, inside a folder called "current". A saved setting file may be found like this: "C:\Users\Shakralay\.config\mudlet\profiles\Avalon_RPG\current\30-06-2017#00-21-35.xml".

Mudlet will generate another xml setting file each time it closes (assuming you save on close) and each time you click 'Save Profile'. Mudlet does no housekeeping with these files, and if you install or create a lot of settings, these files may begin to pile up and bloat a bit, so its good to know where they are kept so you can remove old ones as necessary. Remember: each file contains the complete copy of your settings, so only keep a few weeks worth of recent files.