Problem
Users who work from multiple machines (e.g., home and office) want different default layouts to load automatically on each machine. By default, the starred (default) layout is a user-level preference and when a user stars a layout on one machine, that same layout becomes the default on all machines.
Solution
There is no built-in feature to star a layout per machine, but you can achieve per-machine default layouts by using environments to run different environment configurations on each machine. This works by creating separate desktop shortcuts that launch io.Connect Desktop with different env values, allowing each machine to maintain its own default layout.
Steps
1. Create a separate system configuration file for each machine/environment.
For example, create system-office.json and system-home.json in the io.Connect Desktop config folder, each specifying a different env value:
{
"region": "test",
"env": "office"
}
{
"region": "test",
"env": "home"
}
2. Create desktop shortcuts for each environment.
Create separate desktop shortcuts of the io.Connect Desktop executable (io-connect-desktop.exe, or tick42-glue-desktop.exe in older versions), renaming them to correspond to the environment.
3. Set command line arguments on each shortcut.
Right-click each shortcut, go to Properties, and in the Target field add configOverrides arguments to override the base configuration:
-- config=config/system.json configOverrides config0=config/system-office.json
Replace system-office.json with the name of the configuration file for that environment.
4. Save layouts per environment.
Add and save the layouts for each machine to the appropriate environment. Launch the shortcut to start the desired environment.
Alternative Approaches
- Use separate io.Manager instances — one for each group of machines (e.g., home vs. office), which allows different default layouts to be selected per instance.
- Use different io.Manager users — one user account for the office and another for home usage, each with their own layout preferences.