USER Converter

Extract text from Visual Studio settings files (USER)


Drop or upload your .USER file
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How to extract text from your USER file

  1. Click the "Select File" button above, and choose your USER file.
  2. You’ll see a preview, if available.
  3. Click the "Convert file to..." button to extract text information.

Convert USER to another file type

To convert USER settings files to another format, you need Microsoft Visual Studio or other Settings software.

Convert a file to USER

To convert other file formats to the "Project Configuration File" file type, you need software like Microsoft Visual Studio or a similar tool.


About USER files

A .user file stores localized, user-specific project preferences for integrated development environments (IDEs) like Microsoft Visual Studio. It typically saves settings such as debugging paths, start-up arguments, window layouts, and target frameworks in standard XML or UTF-8 text formats. While natively managed by Visual Studio, you can view these files using basic text editors. However, .user files present significant collaboration challenges. Because they contain hard-coded absolute paths (e.g., local C:\ directories) and highly personalized configurations, committing them to source control like Git will frequently break the build environments of other developers. Furthermore, they are prone to bloat, accumulating obsolete temporary settings over the lifecycle of a complex project. They also lack universal cross-platform support outside their parent IDE. To normalize and share these configurations safely, you should convert them. For web portability or structured data sharing, convert to generic JSON or YAML. For simple documentation and archiving, convert to TXT or standardized XML.

Convert.Guru analyzes your USER file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.

Users also converted CSPROJ, XBF, VCPROJ and SETS files.


FAQ

If you want to convert USER file to INI, CFG, CONF, CONFIG, JSON, XML, YAML, YML, TOML, ENV, PROPERTIES or RC, you can use Microsoft Visual Studio or similar software from the "Local User Project Settings" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….

To convert ZSHRC, CONF, RCFILE, GITCONFIG, RC, PLIST, BASHRC, CONFIG, PROFILE, INI, PREFS or CFG files to USER, try Microsoft Visual Studio or another comparable tool in the "Local User Project Settings" category.



The USER Converter Story

The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our USER converter.