Filament presets are...way too complicated to manage
So I feel like I've gone to my garden to plant some oregano, taken a single trowel full of topsoil and broken through into a vast network of caverns in habited by a race of nth dimensional molemen.
go through the Configuration wizard, pick out Prusament and Jessie and Hatchbox filaments, plus "generic PLA" and such. So now I have a bunch of "system presets." Now, almost all of them appear either orange or pale grey, "FLEX" filaments appear green. I'd like PLA to be red and ABS to be blue, PETG can stay orange.
Well you can't change the presets, you have to save them as separate files. But...I don't know what does and doesn't go into those files and there doesn't seem to be any way to learn. Because if you look at it in the Plater tab on the right under Filament it just says "Prusament PETG", if I go to the Filaments tab, it says "Prusament PETG @MK4S 0.6" and if I go to save that preset it wants to add the @ nomenclature to the new filename.
Does that mean, if I'm making minor changes to filaments such as the default display color, I have to create my own preset for every nozzle size? Manually?
It feels like this software is actively defying my understanding and use. If I understand this correctly, what the Configuration Wizard does is download a gigantic single .ini file that has all the printer, print setting and filament settings in it, and then chooses which to hide or show.
I noticed that it changes per printer and nozzle equipped, because of course it does. But, the "system presets" seem to have an OOP-like inheritance scheme where it builds up the profile from PLA > Prusament PLA > Prusament PLA @MK4S > Prusament PLA @MK4S HF0.4 where relevant parameters are either stored only in or overridden by more specific entries. But I can't make my own version of that; I get to make individual .ini files that have all the parameters in them. So if I use 3 different polymers, from 3 different vendors, and I keep 3 different nozzle sizes in stock, the second I want to so something as trivial as change the default display color of those plastics, or increase the bed temperature by 5 degrees for all PETG, it instantly gets 27 times uglier to manage?
Oh, how about this: I own more than one computer. I sure am glad I have an IT staff to task with stuff like keeping the printer and filament settings on two devices in sync, because logging into your Prusa account doesn't do any of that. I can store G-Code in the cloud for no reason I can think of but I can't sync slicer settings between two devices without syncthinging ~/.var?
RE: Filament presets are...way too complicated to manage
That's basically it yes. Yes there's inheritance. Yes its per machine etc. Filament presets also contain stuff like Pressure advance settings, which can be different for each machine that filament is used on, hence the per machine requirement. Yes it is incredibly messy and complicated. Many existing threads here on the user to user forum and also many more on the Prusa Github.
Nope there no instructions. I think the Prusa guys barely understand the monstrosity they have. It doesn't help in that there's 2 methods that restrict what the slicer shows you. There is the old requirements method and the new Vendor profile spaces. Both are used at the same time.
Once you break with any of the presets and only use your own it becomes 'simpler'. From a certain point of view.
Its almost as if the entire edifice is a house of cards. Its needs a complete rethink or if not a dedicated bit of profile management software.
BTW for syncing you can use various methods. From manually exporting Config bundles (which contain only custom profiles) between machines to using 3rd party software to sync specific folders (there's threads on that here too) but that has its own pitfalls when it comes to cross platform use.
Again the PS github has existing requests for all of this stuff.