I am curious if I can remove that code path / binary build setup.

TASClient users still use standalone, IIRC.

Evo does. However, almost everything can be set in game at this point. But yeah, still needed.

what does "standalone SpringSettings" mean?

springs installer includes / uses springsettings.exe.

I do!

I hope one day to make it all via ingame menu in Lua, but even then I'll still need standalone SpringSettings for when the settings are so bad Spring won't run.

Exactly that.

aahh, got it. didn't know / see that springlobby.exe includes the settings dialog.

afaik zero-k lobby uses (or used?) it, too.

springsettings is a nice-to have, but with --safemode it should be possible to always fix settings in-(game/)engine.

only missing thing would be the hotkey editor.

You can't set screen resolution ingame. You can't set refresh rate nor fullscreen/windowed, etc with it either. In this case I'm talking about chili.

start spring.exe, click edit settings:
FullScreen = 0|1
VSync = 0|1
FullScreen = 0|1
XResolution = 0..n
YResolution = 0..n

and yes, all these settings needs a restart... but "can't" isn't correct :)

With chili, atm, you cannot set those settings. That does not mean that it is impossible to add those settings to change, but at the moment it is not possible to change the, via chili.

Until those settings are added to chili, it would be a good idea to keep ss around.

Then let me know, they can be added in just a few lines to epicmenu-config.