The Magic Utilities offers two storage locations. The Windows Registry and INI files.
The Windows Registry is the default location on new installations. Updates remain on the current settings location. If you see settings warning or error dialogs, change to Windows Registry.
Change the storage location
From the menu select Settings > Settings storage > and select the new location.
The current location is marked with a ● dot.
Windows Registry
If you have any settings issue, choose this as it works in general more reliable. This is were Windows itself and most other applications store their settings. You can use regedit.exe to edit the settings directly.
| Local user settings | HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\MagicUtilities |
|---|---|
| Global settings | HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\MagicUtilities |
INI files
You can use any text editor like notepad.exe to edit INI-files directly.
| Local user settings | "C:\Users\%UserName%\AppData\Local\MagicUtilities\MagicKeyboardUtilities.ini" or %localappdata%\MagicUtilities\MagicKeyboardUtilities.ini |
|---|---|
| Global settings | "C:\ProgramData\MagicUtilities\MagicUtilities.ini" or %commonappdata%\MagicUtilities\MagicUtilities.ini |
Global and user settings
Do not edit global settings unless you really know what you are doing.
To edit global settings, you have to manually open the related location with editors described above.
To edit user settings, select Settings > Settings storage > Edit user settings storage.
In case things go wrong, select Settings > Default settings to reset all user settings and some global settings to defaults.
History
Since the dawn of the Magic Utilities in 2010, we store settings in so called INI-files, simple plain text files with [Sections] containing Key = Value pairs.
These files can to read easily by humans, modified in any text editor like Notepad and making backups is just a file copy. So far so good!
We had a few issue reports which turned out to be corrupt settings, so we added more verification error checking on opening and writing settings. To our very surprise on some machines, especially in enterprise environments, access to our very own INI-files was blocked. In two cases we could track it down to so called "endpoint protection" which are basically anti-virus scanners.
As there is nothing we can do we decided to offer another storage location, the Windows Registry which has some technical advantages, but is less friendly to humans.