Dave Kriewall suggests: When exporting settings for component "File templates, Code templates, Code style schemes", the generated settings.jar file contains a file "options/other.xml". Other.xml in turn contains settings for various components. Some of these, however, are not suitable for export/import, if the point of importing is to assure uniformity of settings among developers on a particular project or team. (Some are probably debatable.) I suggest that the settings for the following three components be placed in separate files: PropertiesComponent, RecentProjectsManager, FindSettings (Recent find/replace/dir strings). Recent ProjectsManager contains a list of projects I have recently used; this is not something that should be imported into someone else's IDE. Similarly, recent search and replace strings should not be imported into an IDE.