CLion 2019.1 Help

Project and IDE Preferences

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

  • Project settings, that apply to a specific project. In the Settings/Preferences dialog (Ctrl+Alt+S), they are marked with the Current Project icon.

  • 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 template 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 the 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\<Username>\; in Windows Vista it is C:\Users\<Username>\

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, and so on. 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, and so on 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 name

User settings

codestyles

Contains code style schemes.

colors

Contains editor colors and fonts customization schemes.

filetypes

Contains user-defined file types.

inspection

Contains code inspection profiles.

keymaps

Contains CLion keyboard shortcuts customizations.

options

Contains various options, for example, feature usage statistics and macros.

templates

Contains user-defined live templates.

tools

Contains configuration files for the user-defined external tools.

shelf

Contains shelved changes.

Locations of the config, system, and plugins directories can be modified in idea.properties file. For more information, see Configuring platform properties.

Last modified: 24 July 2019

See Also