Where does Less.app store its configuration files?

Question

Less.app is a very cool tool for using LESS / CSS - but I can't figure out where it stores its configuration file.

I thought perhaps it was storing it in this file:

~/Library/Application Support/Less app/lessDataFile.lessData

However that does not seem to be the case. Does anyone know where the correct configuration file is? To clarify I'm looking for the one that stores the list of folders and paths that are used by the app.

Answer 1

Bryan here. Guy behind Less.app. The above locations for the data file and preferences are correct. The reason the app stores the information in a "don't mess with this" format is that it was never designed to be used across machines.

Here's the reason: say you have two computers. They both have the exact same website project in the exact same location. Say, ~/Desktop/Project/main.less exists on both computers. You might think you could add this project to Less.app on one machine and "share" the data file between the two computers. But behind the scenes, OS X sees these "exact same" files as very different. They have different file identifiers, which is the primary way Less.app "knows" which file is which.

It's a very challenging issue to manage, because there's no way for Less.app to know if two projects across two machines are really the same project or if they just have the same structure and file names.

And, since the app started life three years ago as my own personal tool and since I didn't need to synchronize across multiple machines, I never designed it to be used that way.

Answer 2

You had actually guessed right. The list of folders and paths used by the app are in:

~/Library/Application Support/Less app/lessDataFile.lessData

It's a binary plist (Property List) file, and from the look of the structure of the file, it's not meant to be messed with. It looks like an unintuitive serialization/dump of the internal state of the app.

It seems to store its preferences in this other binary plist file:

~/Library/Preferences/com.incident57.Less.plist

...but this file doesn't contain any of the folder paths used by the app. That's all in the lessDataFile.lessData file you'd already found.

It's standard practice for Mac OS X apps to store their preferences in a plist like that (that location, that naming scheme).

You can read and edit binary plist files with Xcode (and many other programming-oriented text editors for Mac OS X), or with the command-line tools PlistBuddy(8), or defaults(1). Or you can convert them to XML text files with plutil(1). Some tools for working with plists expect the file name to end in .plist, so keep that in mind if you're struggling to get a tool to open the .LessData file.