Open multiple LightBurn instances on a Mac?

[kill3rfruit (Keith)]

I was wondering if anyone has figured out how to open Lightburn in multiple instances on a Mac like you can in Windows?

[berainlb (PY)]

This really is an operating system thing. Apple makes this a little more difficult than it ought to be but is perfectly doable.

Take a look here:
macos - Launch multiple instances of application in Mac - Stack Overflow

[kill3rfruit (Keith)]

Perfect, that worked for me

[jkwilborn (Jack Wilborn)]

Do you know where the 2nd invocation of Lightburn reads it’s configuration, such as the ‘current’ device…?

Some one asked this and I could only speculate.

Different Machine Settings

Is there a way I can make different LightBurn shortcuts on my desktop to automatically load different machine settings. For example, I have settings for flat use and different settings for rotary use. Instead of going into the machine settings and loading the different profiles I was hoping to have two different shortcuts on my desktop.

[berainlb (PY)]

@jkwilborn

Do you know where the 2nd invocation of Lightburn reads it’s configuration, such as the ‘current’ device…?

It uses the same prefs and default device. It’s literally just instantiating another instance of the program in memory rather than “intelligently” swapping to the running instance. I don’t use this much from but memory I don’t believe it will cut off your current device connection so not sure if there’s any intelligence there or it’s just blocked on the device.

[jkwilborn (Jack Wilborn)]

I was suspicious that it has only a single instance of files at startup… Makes sense.

Thanks

[berainlb (PY)]

If you’re curious, @adammhaile had an interesting post where he shows how to use independent prefs file for different instances. He shows this for Windows but looks like the principles could be used for other OSes.

Software, settings, and more

It pretty much confirmed to me that one instance of LightBurn was overwriting the other. Hence your problems. Given what you want to do and how LightBurn handles preferences, I believe you need another solution. It’s possible to tell LightBurn to use a different path for the preferences, but it takes a little work. We’ll make it easier in the future most likely, but for now here’s how to do it. Follow these directions exactly: Open LightBurn and go to File > Export Prefs. Save the .lbprefs f…

[adammhaile (Adam Haile)]

For Mac you can call open -n <path_to_LB_app>
The next big release will probably have a profile manager and the ability to just choose File > New Window but that will be at least a few months out.