[chirp_users] CHIRP Tips: Advanced Editing

[Dan Smith]

> I changed my 
> [prefs]
> stock_configs = E:\@online docs\Amateur Radio\CHIRP stock_configs
> as a test.
> 
> ?? Something I did yesterday during my testing and installing the latest standalone version emptied out my custom stock_configs dir (or I did it by mistake) and cleared the [prefs] section so that when I started up this morning, I got the default loc.

In the olden times, CHIRP would copy all of the distributed stock configs into the user's personal directory. That was a big problem because it was then hard for us to update those files when they change (and they do, such as the new GMRS rules a few years ago). It's also a minor problem in that it's harder to distinguish your files from the distributed ones in the same directory and deleting them would cause CHIRP to just copy them in again.

In next, the distributed ones are separate from the user's own stock configs, we read them out of each location, and that's also why they're separated in the menu so you can tell the difference. In order to avoid duplication for people who have stock configs that were copied into their personal directory by legacy, next will purge the stock configs from the personal location they exist there (and only if they are unchanged from the source file).

So, assuming you've copied some of the distributed files directly into your personal/overridden stock_configs directory, you'll see that purging activity happen because chirp assumes it was legacy that copied those files there. If you don't want that to happen, just make any change to those files (like put a comment somewhere in the file after the first header line, prefixed with a '#'). That should cause it to look modified and chirp will leave it alone.

> https://chirp.danplanet.com/projects/chirp/wiki/AdvancedConfig
> "Group" =? "section" ?

A library I use for reading these files calls them groups, but yes, you got it.

> Maybe [whatever] isn't really needed? CHIRP simply scans for keys? At any rate, I decided that "group" means "section", and it worked fine.

No, the section/group *does* matter. You can't just put keys wherever you want, they have to be in the right place in order to be honored.

> BOM - yep. I tripped myself here. I have my editor set to change unknown file types that are UTF-8 to use a BOM. Then when I saved the config file, CHIRP threw a mysterious (at the time) error, saying that the first line had an error. Of course, it didn't appear in the editor, so I was puzzled at first.

I should be able to fix this if you open a bug for the issue to "charge" it against. I think may be the only person that will notice, but it's an easy change in the encoding we use to read the file :)

--Dan