Handling pbxuser and mode1 files in XcodeEdit

According to Apple’s Chris Espinosa:

One thing you could do is take your daniel.pbxuser and rename it to default.pbxuser, then commit it with the project. Xcode loads default.pbxuser unless there’s a username-matching pbxuser file.

What is actually stored in a .pbxuser file?

• Scott Tooker (Apple): "the locations for built products and intermediates files."
• David Ewing (Apple): "The currently active target, executable, and build style are all stored in the file … Other information includes window/view sizes, bookmarks, breakpoints, custom executables, smart groups and code sense settings."

What is actually stored in a .mode1 file?

• Scott Tooker: "The .mode1 file contains layout information for the project (like window positions and sizes, including sizes of sub-views and the like)."
• Scott Tooker: "[T]he various *.mode* files track information about your workspace configuration. It’s nothing critical to the project so it is safe to throw them away."

Another post from Scott:

Currently we already separate project settings data into two parts:

project.pbxproj - per project data (file & group hierarchy, target build settings, for example) <username>.pbxuser - per user per project data (user bookmarks, custom executables, UI layout)

In future releases we want to separate project data from UI layout data (so the <username>.pbxuser file would split into two files). The .mode1 files are step in this direction.

We’ve also talked about separating out target-specific data from the project.pbxproj file.

Suggested action

Git

If using Git, you can add a .gitignore file inside your project bundle with contents like this:

*.mode1
*.pbxuser
!default.pbxuser

Subversion

After closing Xcode:

svn mv wincent.pbxuser default.pbxuser
svn mv wincent.mode1 default.mode1
svn commit

Although it appears that Xcode ignores the default.mode1 file. So consider this instead:

cd path_to_project_bundle
svn commit -m "Pre-rename pbxuser commit"
svn mv wincent.pbxuser default.pbxuser
svn commit -m "Create default.pbxuser"
svn propset svn:ignore 'wincent.*' .
svn commit -m "Ignore wincent.pbxuser, wincent.mode1 etc"

You can still check-in the files occasionally but will no longer see them in status listings.

If the files in question are already in the repository you’ll need to get rid of them:

svn del URL_TO_PBXUSER_FILE_IN_REPOSITORY
svn del URL_TO_MODE1_FILE_IN_REPOSITORY
svn up