# Preferences in Envisage

This section discusses how an Envisage application uses the preferences mechanism. Envisage tries not to dictate too much, and so this describes the default behaviour, but you are free to override it as desired.

Envisage uses the default implementation of the `ScopedPreferences` class which is made available via the application’s ‘preferences’ trait:

    >>> application = Application(id='myapplication')
    >>> application.preferences.set('acme.ui.bgcolor', 'yellow')
    >>> application.preferences.get('acme.ui.bgcolor')
    'yellow'

Hence, you use the Envisage preferences just like you would any other scoped preferences.

It also registers itself as the default preferences node used by the `PreferencesHelper` class. Hence you don’t need to provide a preferences node explicitly to your helper:

    >>> helper = SplashScreenPreferences()
    >>> helper.bgcolor
    'blue'
    >>> helper.width
    100
    >>> helper.ratio
    1.0
    >>> helper.visible
    True

The only extra thing that Envisage does for you is to provide an extension point that allows you to contribute any number of ‘.ini’ files that are loaded into the default scope when the application is started.

e.g. To contribute a preference file for my plugin I might use:

    from envisage.ids import PREFERENCES
    ...

    class MyPlugin(Plugin):
        ...

        contributed_preferences = List(contributes_to=PREFERENCES)

        def _contributed_preferences_default(self):
            return ['pkgfile://mypackage:preferences.ini']