Settings v2

[krlvi]

The broader goal here is to create a good setup for application settings that is ergonomic for users, easy to work with and not error prone. In general, what VSCode does with settings is great and probably a good target - a user can use the UI or edit the JSON, the settings are portable.

Requirements:

• Settings file is user-editable
• If the settings file contains mistakes (eg. missing commas etc) it does not break the app
• The settings file should not contain entries for all defaults values in existence
• Allow nesting/grouping of related configs
• The settings should be editable via the UI as well and have those changes reflected in the same file (similar to VSCode)
• The app should watch/listen for updates in the settings file and upon change reflect that in it's behavior (e.g. need to update the UI)
• Clear /discoverable defaults
• Within Rust, settings structs fields should not be Options if there are well defined defaults (development ergonomics)
• Should be hard to mess something up when adding new config structs or fields to existing structs and their respective update APIs
• If the settings json file contains comments, the app should not mess with those upon settings changes via the UI

Outstanding questions:

• Where should the settings file live? ~/.config/gitbutler/settings.json, ~/.gitbutler.json? Somewhere else? How about Windows?
• Maybe temporarily skip the requirement for preserving comments in the json to simplify implementing?

TODOs:

• More tests
• APIs for UI
• Filesystem watching for the settings file & appropriate actions
• Settings change event propagation to frontend
• Preserve comments in the json

Out of scope here:

• Adopt in typescript
• Migrate existing settings to the new format
• Remove LegacySettings and the tauri store plugin

[vercel]

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Name	Status	Preview	Comments	Updated (UTC)
gitbutler-components	✅ Ready (Inspect)	Visit Preview	💬 Add feedback	Dec 19, 2024 5:53pm
gitbutler-web	✅ Ready (Inspect)	Visit Preview	💬 Add feedback	Dec 19, 2024 5:53pm

[Byron]

I am really excited to see this new settings system come to life!

Given our recent conversation I felt compelled to comment early, despite the draft status and hope you don't mind.

[krlvi]

I am really excited to see this new settings system come to life!

Given our recent conversation I felt compelled to comment early, despite the draft status and hope you don't mind.

Thank you, this was really helpful. I have now implemented your feedback

[Caleb-T-Owens]

All these cool kids using Arc 😆

[Byron]

I went 'all in' on the review and hope I left it more maintainable than before. With that said, please feel free to dial it back here and there. Particularly the names might be overly verbose and could just be simpler.

Please do all the application settings real-world testing once again, I only launched the app once and it seemed to work, but I didn't do any app-setting specific testing.