Torkil Johnsen

I am a huge fan of the lightweight code editor Coda, made by Panic. It is a combined code editor and FTP client that I frequently use during work hours. Probably the application I use the most, if you disregard Firefox. Today, Murphy’s law kicked in though; Just as we are approaching the deadline on a large project, my laptop screen dies. For no good reason.

This is no crisis, we have spare computers, but having to set up all my needed Coda sites all over again would just be too much hassle. So I needed to transfer all Coda sites, stored passwords and I would prefer not having to purchase Coda all over again to use it on the old backup computer.

Coda also contains code snippets and plugins that really makes me work more effectively, and those would be alot of hassle for me to add manually.

So I googled a bit on how to do this, and this is what I did:

1. I connected the old desktop computer to the laptop with a Firewire cable, and turned on the laptop. Immediately after pressing the power button, I press and hold “T” on the laptop. This will start the laptop in Target Disk Mode, making it function like a regular external harddrive.
2. I copied the Coda application from the Application folder on the laptop to the Application folder on the desktop computer. When trying to start Coda after this, it was like I had just downloaded the program: I had 15 days left on my trial period, and no sites in sight.
3. To transfer the Coda settings I copied ~/Library/Preferences/com.panic.Coda.plist from my laptop to the same folder on the desktop computer. ~/ stands for your home-folder, in /Users/yourname. This took care of all my Sites, but not their passwords.
4. Next I also copied ~/Library/Application Support/Coda from my laptop to the same folder on the desktop computer. This took care of all my plugins and stored code snippets
5. Last thing I needed was the passwords to all the sites stored in Coda. To do this I first opened the folder ~/Library/Keychains on my laptop. Here I duplicated the file “login.keychain” and renamed my copy “laptop.keychain”. I then copied this file over to the Desktop of the other computer. On the new computer I opened the application Keychain (from Applications/Utilities) and created a new keychain called laptop, which is stored in ~/Library/Keychains. I then replace this new keychain with the old one from the laptop, and tadaaaaa…

All done! Both Coda, sites, passwords, plugins, code snippets and general happiness transferred from one computer to the other!