How to edit a Cura profile in a text editor (Power User Zone Here)

by | Feb 13, 2018 | 0 comments

Intro

There comes a time in the life of a 3D printing enthusiast that the GUI of his or hers slicer does not cut it. In my case for example, I needed to remove some material temperature overrides from a custom profile I made.

The issue is that once you save a profile with any temperature override, then switching materials will not change the temperatures. This is good for tweaking, but then when you’re trying to use a custom profile in a more generic sense OR share it with a friend, it’s cumbersome and error inducing.

Thus, I find myself needing to get rid of the temperature override. Not only to change the temperature back, but rather to make it so that there never was any temperature mentioned in the profile.

I export the profile and try to open in text editor. Alas.

error

It doesn’t work! 😖The files just get corrupted, even if some editors like Atom do actually open the .curaprofile. Hence, this post:

Howto modify .curaprofile in a text editor

.curaprofile is in fact a .zip archivee with several .cfg files in it, and we need to treat is as such.

  1. Open the .curaprofile as a .zip archive
  2. Modify the files
  3. Re-compress the files

ONE OPTION: a bit convoluted, but with no 3rd party software needed

  1. rename the profile to profile.zip instead of profile.curaprofile
  2. extract the files
  3. edit them
  4. re-compress into a new .zip archive
  5. rename to .curaprofile again.
  6. done

A BETTER OPTION: simpler, but you need to install the open source and cross platform B1 Free Archiver

  1. open the .curaprofile archive with B1 (no renaming necessary.)
  2. double click on the file you wanna edit
  3. it will open in your default text editor
  4. make you changes and save them
  5. the program will ask you if you want to save the changes
    • say yes
  6. done. (B1 will re-compress the archive in the background)

Good luck!

Oh, and here’s the FRUIT OF MY EFFORTS:

A generic 0.3mm layer height Cura profile with Cubic infill (gradual, too, to get both strength and a good roof support) and a bunch of other tweaks like wider extrusion for solid layers to speed up time, slight elephant foot compensation, and more. Enjoy.