Profile and Preferences

Profile Information

When you first run Chimera, it makes a folder in {home directory}/Library/Application Support/ called Chimera. A folder down inside this folder contains your “profile” information (bookmarks, cookies, cache etc). This is known as your Profile Directory. One of the containing folders has an odd-looking “salted” name for security reasons.

There are two files in your profile that you might need to know about. First, bookmarks.xml contains your bookmarks. You might want to regularly make copies of this file if you run nightly builds, to back up your bookmarks. Secondly, prefs.js contains most of the application preferences. This or a user.js file can be edited to set hidden preferences to enable additional features in Chimera.

Setting Hidden Preferences

Various advanced features in Chimera can be enabled via hidden preferences. These feature are generally not exposed in the user interface because they only apply to a small set of users, are experimental or in-progress features, or are not recommended for general use.

Chimera preferences are stored in text-format files (actually JavaScript files) called prefs.js and user.js in the profile directory. prefs.js is created and managed by the application; editing it is not recommended, because Chimera rewrites the file on each run. Settings specified in user.js will overrule settings in prefs.js.

To add additional preferences, create a file called user.js in the profile directory, using a text editor (such as BBEdit). Having created user.js, add the lines for the prefs you want to set. Here are some examples:

user_pref("browser.underline_anchors", false);
user_pref("browser.anchor_color", "#0000ee");
user_pref("font.minimum-size.x-western", 9);

Be careful to enter the lines exactly as specified, getting " and ; in the right places.

When you save this file, be sure to save it in plain text format (TextEdit is not recommended for editing, because it’s easy to save in RTF format by mistake.)

Chimera’s Hidden Features

Ha, you thought I was going to make it easy for you!