What is the darktablerc-common for?

Jetze · November 5, 2025, 6:53pm

Since short I see a new file I haven’t noticed before: darktablerc-common.
It contains:
database/multiple_workspace=FALSE
font_size=12.000000
themes/usercss=false
ui/hide_tooltips=false
ui_last/gui_language=
ui_last/theme=darktable-elegant-grey
use_system_font=TRUE

Probably something new to influence the looks/styles of dt.
Will set the line containing themes/usercss to “TRUE” to see what happens as I’ve lost some visual changes made to dt.
I’m currently on: 5.3.0+733~gdf7df68304 Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS

wpferguson · November 5, 2025, 6:54pm

darktable (master) now supports “workspaces” which consist of different databases and darktablerc files. However there is some common darktablerc settings that need to be accessible to all “workspaces”, so that’s what’s in the darktablerc-common file.

Jetze · November 5, 2025, 7:00pm

Thanks Bill,

Though - as of yet - only using one workspace I can see the use of this improvement.

I’ve just changed the named switch and got back the changes I made through

Others may experience similar things in this situation.

Kind regards, Jetze

Jetze · November 6, 2025, 9:42am

Bill,

The ‘workspace’ made me curious. Does this mean I can have one darktable program and multiple databases. So I may end up with a workspace for imported pictures in the context of ‘play_raw’ separated from my own pictures?
Or that I may try out multiple settings in darktablerc - though I’m unfortunately not yet knowledgeable enough to have an idea about the use of that.

This in opposition to having multiple darktable versions as well for f.i. testing or documentation purposes - which I would love to setup and start contributing to this great project.

Donatzsky · November 6, 2025, 11:48am

Yes. It was added because of this feature request:

github.com/darktable-org/darktable

UI to switch library

opened 04:39AM - 15 Oct 25 UTC

closed 07:22AM - 25 Oct 25 UTC

frivoal

priority: low feature: new difficulty: average

**Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.** Most of the …time when I take pictures, they're a regular part of "my" photography: things I take for myself because I want to. In that case, the current darktable workflow is great. But some of the time, I take pictures for someone else, because they asked me to. Call that a job. It's conceptually unrelated to the rest of what I do, and I don't like having everything in the same catalog/database/library. This is not only an abstract sense of whether things belong together or not: I also use tags / color labels / ratings differently, and it's a bit of a problem for me that my regular tag/ratings/color labels/etc bleed into my job specific ones, and vice versa. Also, if I'm showing my screen to someone to show them a work-in-progress job, I would much rather there was no information visible anywhere about the content of other jobs or about my regular collection. **Describe the solution you'd like** I would like a module, in the lighttable, which lets me create new libraries and switch between existing ones. It should probably have: * an info line, showing the current name/path of the open library * a button to create a new library, which opens a file dialog to pick where it should go / what it should be called * a button to open an existing library, which opens a file dialog to pick an existing library * a list of recently opened libraries, maybe with a reset toggle to purge that history, or with individual `-` buttons to remove individual entries from the list For maximum convenience, there could be an option when creating a new library asking if it should be created completely blank, or initialized with a set of pre-populated tags, to be fetched from the same kind of files that can be imported / exported from the "tagging" module.. **Alternatives** There is already a solution to my problem: using `dartable --library [path-to-alternate.db]` from the command line, and it does the right thing (except initializing tags from a saved file, but that can be done as a separate step), except it calls for using the command line, and having simple UI for that would be nice.

Jetze · November 6, 2025, 1:33pm

Nice, thanks for the info, have read and will use new functionality.