Added preference setting to solve persistence as optional toggle.

[Sekuora]

Dear nutti, this is a proposal that adds persistence in the add-on. Creating settings that could be later on shared between other installations of screencast keys and survive add-on reloads.

I hope you can evaluate if it serves the development of the add-on. Otherwise, I hope it serves as inspiration for future add-on features.

What was changed:

• Added a new add-on preference: Persist Preferences.
• When enabled, the add-on saves its preferences to:
  Blender user config/screencast_keys/preferences.json
• When the add-on is enabled again, it loads that .json file and restores saved preferences.
• When Persist Preferences is disabled, it removes the .json file and keeps the behavior that restores settings to defaults.

How it works:

2026-06-05.20-15-45.mp4

• Additional benefits are that this save data file can be shared. With import/export buttons (not done yet).
• Implementation can go further and store custom mouse data, local to the add-on. Currently stores custom image data paths only.

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Example persistence file:
preferences.json

What gets persisted:

• Normal display settings like color, font size, margins, alignment, etc.
• UI settings like sidebar/overlay visibility, panel space, and panel category.
• Custom mouse image settings and file paths.
• Display event text alias settings, including alias collection values.
• Other supported Blender RNA preference values: booleans, numbers, strings, enums, arrays, and collections.

Implementation details:

• Added generic preference serialization/deserialization helpers in preferences.py.
• Used as much of best practices for blender add-ons persistent settings as possible.
• Added load-on-register and save/remove-on-unregister hooks in __init__.py.
• Moved the existing display-event-alias initialization into a helper so restored aliases are not overwritten.

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[nutti]

This is interesting feature.
Thank you @Sekuora .

We need some document for the user.
Is it possible to update this document as well?
https://github.com/nutti/Screencast-Keys/blob/master/docs/tutorial.md

Also, introducing importing/exporting configuration function is a nice idea.

[nutti]

We need to change blender_manifest.toml to accept files permission.

https://github.com/nutti/Screencast-Keys/blob/master/src/screencast_keys/blender_manifest.toml

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/advanced/extensions/getting_started.html

[nutti]

Is my understanding correct, this is still valid when there is no configuration file,

[Sekuora]

Yes, I tested and there's no traces of that.

The fix is now part of the function def ensure_display_event_text_aliases(prefs) in preferences.py.

This will create a dictionary containing all the known keys taking from ops.EventType.names[event.name] same ones used by default and guarantees a single entry per item.

Then it reads from the user overrides which don't need to be persisted on the save file for this to work, keeping the fix.

[nutti]

Can we follow semantic versioning?
In this case, 1.0.0 is good.

[nutti]

Please move to the top-level import instead of here.

[nutti]

What does this item mean?

[Sekuora]

It is the entry point for the persist Boolean of the new setting. It has to be written explicitly the first time a preferences file is created to keep track if the user want to restore this setting file or delete it. Maybe I can think of aa different name.

[Sekuora]

Hello, thanks for the review.
I changed this:

1. The save file version name from 1 to 1.0.0
2. Permissions in manifest file now include "files" using the extensions guide format.
3. Explanation of what the persist preferences feature does in docs.

please let me know if anything else comes up.

[nutti]

@Sekuora
Sorry for the late response.
Do you want to abandon this PR?