[calamari4065]

Agreed. The windows registry needs to be killed with fire.

There's no appreciable difference between the registry and a directory of config files except that instead of an INI parser you have to use the much, much worse WIN32 API.

Editing config files is fairly safe and user-intuitive. Sure you can break something by writing the wrong config file, but you do not risk breaking everything. But clumsy use of regedit does have a chance of totally borking the entire system.

And then you have maniacs who store user data in the registry. I know of at least one game which stores save files in the registry.

I get the intention of the registry, but it's just not fit for purpose. Maybe it was better back in the 90s, but it's just a hellscape now.

[raggi]

There are real integration challenges with the "simple file approach":

  - File locking and concurrency
  - Atomic writes / moves
  - Realtime change observations

> clumsy use of regedit does have a chance of totally borking the entire system.

So does a clumsy rm -rf, which shows up in stories here far more often than stories of people breaking their registry.

Can you provide a recent reference to someone bricking their system with regedit?

[dangus]

I think you could even make the argument that nobody breaks their registry because nobody wants to mess with something so user-unfriendly. Even the developers making applications tend stick all their config in .ini files because files are easier for everyone to work with.

[garaetjjte]

Then use SQLite.

[viraptor]

That solves 1 out of the 3 issues... But at that point, why bother? The registry is a database already.

[axus]

But it's so easy to export all my PuTTY profiles from the SimonTatham registry folder to a .reg file and use on the next computer...