Where can I find or export the Find and Replace patterns from an old installation of Alpha? It would be very tedious to copy and paste the thirty patters in my old computer to my new computer. Apple's migration assistant did not copy them over.
Thanks,
John
Hi John,
I'm not sure which patterns you have in mind. Do you mean just the last used patterns or do you mean saved patterns that would be listed at the bottom of the Patterns popup in the Find dialog.
The former are stored in a global variable called recentSearches, the latter are stored in a global array called searchPattern. Both variables are found respectively in the files defs.tcl or arrdefs.tcl located in Alpha's Preferences folder (by default ~/Library/Preferences/Alpha-v9).
Anyway, what you could do is :
- find an older copy of Alpha's Preferences folder (maybe in a TimeMachine backup or on your older machine)
- quit Alpha
- replace the current Preferences folder by the older one
- restart Alpha
The order matters: quit Alpha before you overwrite its Preferences folder.
Hi Bernard,
Thank you very much for explaining this to me.
For what it’s worth, I was looking to restore the saved patters from the old machine. I did not dare to hope that the transient recent patterns might be accessible. That is quite nice.
As an added bonus, overwriting Alpha’s preferences on the Catalina machine with the preference folder from the El Capitan machine has solved my Embrace problem (Ticket #253). Thank you for suggesting this.
Best,
John