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I want to add my compiz settings to a git repo but I'm having a hard time isolating the relevant files. My home directory is a bit of a mess here. I see gnome, compiz, and gconf everywhere. Which are the right ones? :)


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+1. This is very useful if one would want to transfer settings from one machine/account to another without having to go through compiz settings manager and manually reset all the settings. –  William Jun 6 '13 at 4:32

2 Answers 2

up vote 4 down vote accepted

It depends on your set-up. They are stored in several locations. The best way for you to find them is to open your Terminal Ctrl-Alt-T, then type sudo locate compiz and press Enter. It will return several results, but you can tell by the names which will contain your settings.

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Looks like the .gconf directory in my case. Running locate compiz | grep /home/<user>/ reveals a few places, but only this directory contains xml files named after the plugins I'm using. Thank you! –  Dane O'Connor Jan 29 '12 at 17:28

On my machine, which appears to be Ubuntu 14.10:

~$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 14.10
Release:    14.10
Codename:   utopic

compiz settings turn out to be stored in ~/.config/:

~$ locate compiz | grep ~ | less

That ~/.cache/ directory probably isn't worth my time to back up, but on inspection ~/.config/ has a bunch other things that are also worth backing up.

If you're planning to back up your Compiz settings, you might just want to back up the entire parent directory of your compiz settings - you're more likely to end up in a familiar desktop environment that way.

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