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## How to save your settings

To save preferences in VisIt, you need only to select Save settings from the Main Window's Options menu. When you choose this option, VisIt saves the current settings to your preferences file so you can use them the next time you run VisIt. VisIt does not automatically save your settings when you make changes to default attributes for plots, operators, or various controls windows. If a VisIt window provides a Make default button, the settings for that window are divided into current settings and default settings. You must click the Make default button to ensure that VisIt will copy the current settings over the default settings. Once you have set your default settings appropriately, save your settings.

If you want to save more than just the default attributes such as the plots in your plot list and where your windows are located, you should save a session file in addition to saving your settings. To save a session file, select the Save session option from the Main Window's File menu, and select a session file name. Once you select a name for your session file, VisIt saves out an XML description of your VisIt session that includes all of the information required to reproduce it.

VisIt saves two preference files, the first of which stores preferences for VisIt's GUI while the second file stores preferences for VisIt's viewer. When running VisIt on UNIXTM MacOS X systems, the preference files are called: "guiconfig" and "config" and they are saved in the ".visit" directory in your home directory. The Windows version of VisIt calls the preference files: "guiconfig for user" and "config for user" where user is your username and they are stored in the directory where the VisIt executable programs were installed.

If you prefer to run VisIt without reading your saved settings, you can provide the -noconfig option on the command line when you run VisIt. The -noconfig argument is often useful when you run the UNIXTM version and you get an updated version of VisIt that is incompatible with your saved settings. VisIt settings are usually compatible between different versions but this is not always the case and some users have had trouble on occasion when transitioning to a newer version. If you find that VisIt has stability problems when it starts up, provide the -noconfig option and then save your settings to write over any older preference files.