Can I save my panel positions as workspaces (and transfer to another computer)?

[woefi]

Hi!

As many of us, I'm used to the UI of adobe – although we may not like every behaviour – much of it has proven to be at least consistent and practical.

I encourage the affinity-team to experiment and try new ideas for a workflow optimised UI that's fun and easy to use – it does not have to stay the way adobe settled. 

But what I'm essentially missing is a way to keep all the _different_ panels arrangements I need per usage - so called "Workspaces" in adobes parlance: 

 

Maybe that is what the "Personas" are for, which is an interesting approach, but I use workspaces to quickly fill my screenS(!) with all the relevant panels and to close the not relevant ones for the job I'm doing right now. 

It's not always just "Exporting" and "Drawing" like the personas allow me to use – sometimes I need e.g "Screendesign", "Typesetting"or "27 + 21,5inch Monitor maximized" "13inch Laptop minimal"

(I'm speaking of the separated mode, of course)

 

Second use-case is to be able to move my Workspaces to a different computer or a new system-installation. I already have to arrange the panels on the 3 Affinity-Apps times 2 (beta) on three machines (3*2*3=18) which is not fun to keep just roughly synchronised...

Is there a way to manually get the .plist-file and put it on the new machine, I'm not sure where the panel-positions are stored.

[R C-R]

3 hours ago, woefi said:

Is there a way to manually get the .plist-file and put it on the new machine, I'm not sure where the panel-positions are stored.

In a word, no. Unfortunately, it is not as simple as finding & copying a single .plist file.

On Macs, the per user settings for the retail apps are stored at file path ~/Library/Containers in subfolders with names beginning with com.seriflabs, like this:

The contents vary but for example, most of the Affinity Photo settings are in the /Data/Library/Application Support/user/ subfolder in files with the .propcol or .dat extension. The betas have a somewhat similar structure but are stored directly in the per user ~/Library/Application Support folder.

However, even if you could figure out which one(s) store panel positions, it is likely that at least some of that data is machine-specific, since different Macs have different sized screens & resolutions. There may also be other issues related to sandboxing & aliases, but the bottom line is the apps are not designed for this.