Please don't remove addon-preferences when user (temporarily) disables addon!!
When we disable an addon (at least in blender 4.1) the preference-properties of this addon are removed by blender. And reset to defaults when re-enabling the addon. This is very inconvenient and makes it basically impossible to conveniently temporarily turn off addons when not using them, because many addons have quite some preferences that are then reset and need to be set again.
Proposal: Please always keep and use existing settings when re-enabling an addon! (Or give us the option to do so with a checkbox!)
(we temporarily disable addons for many reasons, like performance, cleaner ui, less memory usage... But also for debugging purposes when having many addons installed and there's an issue in blender, where we need to exclude some addons to see where the problem is. There's a reason a user disables an addon instead of removing it).
(For clarity: I am only talking about the settings/properties that are stored in the preferences for an addon. Not talking about properties stored in the blend files.)
5 Comments
You can temporarily disable add-ons per Workspace:
Thanks for the tip, but I don't want to filter per workspace, but for blender in general. I switch workspaces all the time and don't want to turn things on and off in each of them constantly, but just in one place. For reasons mentioned in my post.
Also, I didn't tested this, but if it's possible to disable addons in a workspace and enabling them again while still having the same settings; why isn't this same workflow not just working in the addon section of the preferences?! T.b.h. IMO it doesn't make much sense to be able to enable and disable addons in the preferences (instead of removing them) if we lose our settings each time we switch an addon off.
Also I wonder if it would really be useful for debugging and performance reasons mentioned if we only switch addons on/off per workspace.
What if User would like to reinstall fresh adddon cause its causing issued or remove all addon preferences?
It should be obvious in some way that user would have to eg. restart Blender before renabling it
Or alternative solution: Ability to export addon preferences on blender site
Easy: Blender should provide a 'reset to defaults' or 'clear settings'-button per addon (working both in enabled as well as disabled state) so users can do this manually.
[edit] BTW when a user would like to reinstall an addon fresh the user should just REMOVE the already installed addon first. That has always been the advised workflow. Than Blender should remove its settings too. And when installing the same addon again everything will be freshly installed.
YES PLEASE XD