To many Pd users, any text config file will be arcane. How often to
you directly edit text files for your Mail program? Your word
processor? Any GUI app? Pd is a GUI-based program, any kind of
config editing should be possible via the GUI. Then we would have to
think about the underlying storage format.
Of course. The configuration is usually done in the GUI. In Pd the GUI is implemented in tcl/tk. Reading and writing the configuration is done by c code that's platform-specific. I think it makes more sense if that code works with human-readable text files ('simple' xml is human-readable). Maybe the path to the config file would be different according to platform but the file format doesn't need to be different. Isn't OSX already using xml for its own config files?
Martin