I am trying to change some preferences using the pull-down menu “Preferences”
In the Preferences.sublime-settings filed on the right I write
"hot_exit": "disabled"
if I try to save this I get
Error trying to parse settings: Unexpected trailing characters in Packages/User/Preferences.sublime-settings:2:12
The file as a whole needs to be valid JSON, structured the same as the file on the left. The error is an indication that you have an error on line 2, column 12. What that could be would depend on what the remainder of your file looks like though. Watch for settings keys being before the { or after the }, or settings not being separated by commas.