It can be set using http://doc.trolltech.com/4.4/qsettings.html#setPath, but it seems as I am not able to retrieve it.
http://doc.trolltech.com/4.4/qlibraryinfo.html#location QLibraryInfo::LibrariesPath returns the system wide settings dir, which is not what I want.
Any ideas, or do I have to code it separately for each platform?
€: I want to create a sub directory, and store files into it. (You may punish me if this is a bad idea)
What platform are you at?
Might be related or not but in windows, the default is to write QSettings to the registry.
As far as I can tell, you can't retrieve the path. In the Qt source, src/corelib/io/qsettings.cpp, there is a function to get the path:
static QString getPath(QSettings::Format format, QSettings::Scope scope)
{
...
but it's not accessible from code using Qt. You can't copy it and use it either, because it uses internal Qt globals to store the path...
EDIT: A solution was posted, using QDesktopServices.storageLocation(QDesktopServices.DataLocation) but it doesn't do exactly what the question was asking for, i.e. if I set a custom path using QSettings.setPath() it doesn't reflect the change.
I read more into the question than there was as it was originally posted. It is clearer after the edits. Ok, so can't you use..
QString QSettings::fileName () const
Returns the path where settings written using this QSettings object are stored.
On Windows, if the format is QSettings::NativeFormat, the return value is a system registry path, not a file path.
Why do you need to know the settings path? If you are going to put settings in it, you could use QSettings. I could see making a subdirectory to hold various settings, but it seems like the easiest way would be to use QSettings directly.
This might not answer your question directly: if you want to store per-user persistent data, shouldn't you use QDesktopServices::storageLocation(QDesktopServices::DataLocation) instead?
This is nasty workaround. First you create QSettings, then get it's location.
QSettings cfg(QSettings::IniFormat, QSettings::UserScope, "organization", "application");
QString config_dir = QFileInfo(cfg.fileName()).absolutePath() + "/";
Credits goes to Qt Centre forum
Edit: QSettings stores default config in user AppData directory. See documentation for QSettings. Also this code instructs to store config in Ini file format.