Project configuration

The .babel project file

Consider the .babel file as project configuration file. You are asked to store it the first time you save your project.

BabelEdit has to store additional data that can't be saved in .json files (such as the comments, and the state of the approved flags needs). The file also contains references to your language files and other configuration data.

You can check it in your version management system — the file contains relative paths from itself to the translations and should work on all computers as long as all files are on the same file system.

BabelEdit does not store the translations in the .babel file. It always writes the data back to the translation files.

Project configuration dialog

Project configuration

File Format

The settings might vary depending on your selected framework.

These settings describe the file format used for the translation files. You can set the indentation and also the layout.

E.g. for JSON based translation files, it's possible to represent the translations as a flat structure or tree.

  • Indent - indentation for JSON files
  • Format - JSON files can be written as nested (tree) or flat
  • Support arrays - detects the use of array in JSON files. E.g. items.0, item.1, items.2,... can be represented as array instead of explicit IDs

Language Codes

You can add custom language codes in this section. This is useful for languages BabelEdit does not yet support or if you want to create variations - e.g. for specific customers.

Editor

  • Save empty translation - use this if you want to save translations that contain no text. If unset, BabelEdit omits these IDs when saving
  • Translation order - preserve order like in the source file or sort translations by ID
  • Copy Template 1..3 - Set the template when copying an ID to clipboard (by clicking right mouse button in the tree). Use %1 as a placeholder for the ID.
  • Source root - The root folder of your source code files. Used by the source code viewer, add IDs from source and filters.
  • Source code editor - You can double-click on source files in the source code viewer to open a reference in your IDE. BabelEdit detects many IDEs in case yours does not open, set the executable here.
  • Editor parameters - The parameters for the source code editor. %1 for the file name, %2 for the line number

Line endings

BabelEdit stores files with local file endings. That means LineFeed (LF) on macOS and Linux, CarriageReturn-LineFeed (CRLF) on Windows. There is currently no way to change this in the settings.

If you are using in a mixed environment with Windows and macOS or Linux clients, you should configure your license management system to convert between the different ending styles. See our tutorial How to handle line endings in git for more details about how you can do that.