CLion 2017.2 Help

Project and IDE Preferences

On this page:

Overview

There are two types of settings that define your preferred environment:

  • Project Settings, that apply to a specific project. They are marked with current project icon in the Settings/Preferences dialog.
  • IDE Settings, that are common for all projects and refer to the project-independent aspects.

Project Settings

Project settings are stored with each specific project as a set of xml files under the .idea folder. If you specify the default project settings, these settings will be automatically used for each newly created project.

The settings that pertain to a project, are marked with the icon current project icon in the Settings/Preferences dialog.

IDE Settings

IDE settings are stored in the dedicated directories under CLion home directory. The CLion directory name is composed of the product name and version.

For example:

Windows
  • <User home>\.\config that contains user-specific settings.
  • <User home>\.\system that stores CLion data caches.

<User home> in WindowsXP is C:\Documents and Settings\<User name>\; in Windows Vista it is C:\Users\<User name>\

Linux
  • /./config that contains user-specific settings.
  • ~/./system that stores CLion data caches.
macOS
  • ~/Library/Application Support/ contains the catalog with plugins.
  • ~/Library/Preferences/ contains the rest of the configuration settings.
  • ~/Library/Caches/ contains data caches, logs, local history, etc. These files can be quite significant in size.
  • ~/Library/Logs/ contains logs.

Locations of directories

The config directory has several subfolders that contain xml files with your personal settings. You can easily share your preferred keymaps, color schemes, etc. by copying these files into the corresponding folders on another CLion installation. Prior to copying, make sure that CLion is not running, because it can erase the newly transferred files before shutting down.

The following is the list of some of the subfolders under the config folder, and the settings contained therein.

Folder nameUser Settings
codestylesContains code style schemes.
colorsContains editor colors and fonts customization schemes.
filetypesContains user-defined file types.
inspectionContains code inspection profiles.
keymapsContains CLion keyboard shortcuts customizations.
optionsContains various options, for example, feature usage statistics and macros.
templatesContains user-defined live templates.
toolsContains configuration files for the user-defined external tools.
shelfContains shelved changes.

Locations of the config, system, plugins directories can be modified in idea.properties file.

CLion makes it possible to change the *.vmoptions and the idea.properties files without editing them in the CLion installation folder.

To create an empty idea.properties file or to copy the *.vmoptions file, choose Help | Edit Custom Properties... or Help | Edit Custom VM Options... from the main menu respectively.

Last modified: 15 December 2017

See Also