I'm seeing some new people picking up PICO-8 with the 0.2 release announcements (welcome!) and some discussion of the new visible tabs feature is giving the config.txt workflow some attention. People are tripping on the fact that PICO-8 overwrites config.txt on exit without testing for changes.

I'd like a smarter merge of in-memory and on-disk properties. The app should remember last loaded properties so it can calculate "dirty in memory" and "dirty on disk." DiM only? Update disk. DiD only? Update memory. Both DiM and DiD? Tricky, but maybe this is avoidable if PICO-8 always merges on every in-memory change.

I assume PICO-8 already has logic for preserving comments and resolving weird cases like a property appearing more than once, or not at all, in the file. :)

I’d be satisfied if PICO-8 never wrote the config file.
I may move a window or make it fullscreen, doesn’t mean I want all future windows to be the same :) I see the config file as good boot settings.

On a related note, it would be useful to have most of the config settings available on the command line, and some others as runtime shortcut (for example we have Ctrl-P to see CPU stat but have to edit config and restart to see FPS).