Hello all,
here comes part 2 of the much dreaded catch-up post trying to reply to all questions asked (thanks all for the feedback in between btw!) while I've been too busy IRL... (note: I had to remove all emoticons - yours/mine - as the forum kept complaining about too many of them in a single post )
I discovered xoblite bb5, and just started to adapt it to my needs. I also use Rainmeter, and, It happens regularly that the placements of my skins are changed. Is there a solution? Also, is there a tool to export a Theme and a Style?
[...] The rainmeter skins moved; apparently, this is caused when changing Wallpaper and/or workspace (i dont need workspaces, but i dont like a problem unsolved... )
Yes, it seems Rainmeter widget positioning and the classic bb4win Workspaces approach don't play well together, so in the newly released RC3+ I have excluded Rainmeter widgets from said handling (i.e. xoblite ignores them). As for exports, there is the xoblite Designer Mode (see the Configuration/Global submenu) and its related GUI for style authoring. Themes however can be in all kinds of forms, from very simple (e.g. not much more than just another xoblite.rc in a separate theme folder) to very complex, which necessitates manual compiling and some tuning of related resources. For now, you'll find a "Simple example" theme bundled with bb5 RC3+ that will show you the basics; in the future I'll need to work on the documentation of this too of course. One little hint for all of you though is to use *box/xoblite environment variables like $Blackbox$ and $CurrentTheme$ in paths and/or main folder relative paths where applicable; this will make your themes, configuration etc more portable (cf. also how you may unzip the xoblite .zip to any path and it will still work).
Speaking of bbInterface... Is there an option to integrate this plugin into the BB menu? I'd like to keep my screen clean and empty and would like to place bbInterfaces in the menu. Would be awesome to do that. And perhaps I can. I just didn't find a way yet. Thanks in advance.
[...] I thought that, perhaps it was possible to create interfaces that can be shown in the menu (as a sub-menu). The idea is that I don't have the bbInterface-panels/buttons, etc. on my desktop all the time but instead place them in a sub-menu (for example: I open a sub-menu and instead of different menu items I do have on/off-buttons, sliders, etc. right in the menu). This would help the desktop remain clean and simple but still provide us with the power of bbInterface.
It is not possible to integrate regular plugins into the menu in xoblite (bb5 or prior releases) or any other *box variant as far as I know. Reading your question though I started wondering if it'd be possible to add a "Menu item relative" placement mode for the Dock (nb. previously known as the "Slit" in *box, being a container-like window which certain plugins can "dock" to), i.e. something along the lines of hovering over a [dock] menu item showing the Dock window to the right of the menu just like a submenu (or perhaps more like the image preview functionality) would. Might be too much work/complexity to be worth it though, given the (nowadays) relative scarcity of still working, dockable plugins, so don't expect it any time soon at least.
Hmm, I wonder if it'd be possible to pass similar dynamically generated x/y values to a plugin via a smart bro@m parsing adaptation though...(e.g. adding support for e.g. a dynamic "$Position$" environment variable as part of the bro@m or something like that). Requires some further thought for sure.
That reminds me I have to check if I can manage to make bbtcl work on xoblite5.
I never used bbtcl myself - what would you and are you using it for?
Does [insertpath] not work in the menu?
See my comment wrt [include] above. I must admit I don't recall exactly what [insertpath] did differently, if anything? (as said, I never used and didn't quite see the need for any of them tbh, but maybe I've missed something cool here considering that two people have asked about them?)
The question is interesting. In the days of bblean There was a command in extension rc where you could asign a broam/link/?? to the desktop right click. I used that to trigger a bbinterce windows xp like menu or a bbinterface menu of a litestep theme that I liked particularly (hear rounded corners). I never really excelled in that department. The only person I know that can simulate almost anything in bbinterface is Pete of course but the concept worked. I don't know if it can be done in xoblite bb5. I'd suggest you to dive into the xoblite rc. If I can spare an hour or so I may have a look into it too.
For the sake of standardization and ease of access to key xoblite/bb4win functionality (e.g. main menu, styles/themes menu, etc), all desktop mouse click (L/R/M/X1/X2) actions are currently pre-configured i.e. statically assigned, and for people with only 2- or 3-button mice, there are modifier+button variants to accomplish the same as well; see a brief overview in the yet-to-be-finalized documentation in the "Desktop" section at http://xoblite.net/docs/ . Due to the aforementioned reasons, I don't think I'd want to make L/R/M user configurable, but maybe X1/X2 could be optionally configurable with fallback to the default actions. Or maybe some of the modifier+button ones? Maybe you can describe some of your use cases to provide me some further input? Also, this said, it should of course be mentioned that many modern mice and their related SW supports re-assigning mouse buttons (nb. including extra ones beyond X2, i.e. buttons not otherwise visible through the Windows API) to e.g. trigger keyboard commands. This could in turn then be mapped to xoblite hotkeys, and then you'd have more or less the equivalent functionality already today. So, if you're sitting on a mighty 17-button MOBA/MMO mouse that get's no gaming love, you now know what to do...
Some thoughts and questions: (W10 19041.508 if it matters)
- Any way to change or disable the keybind (insert) for pinning menus?
- Any way to change or disable the keybind (mouse wheel) for workspace switching?
- Been a while since I used (a)bb4win but workspaces don't seem to work? Windows seem to just follow when switching instead of staying put etc. Names also seem broken, xoblite.rc names are ignored.
- The toolbar and workspaces seem to ignore a couple programs. Discord mainly but foobar2k and VSCode also seems to show up and disappear sometimes.
- On the topic of workspaces I also had the same question as molecube, Anyway to disable the workspace "widget"?
Also any chance the source will be available at some point? Will test plugin compatibility another day, thanks again.
I opted for insert to pin/unpin as typically nearby keys (delete, home, end... plus arrow keys) are also used for keyboard navigation tasks. As a sidenote, I also added first-letter search in RC3+, see my previous post. With regards to mousewheel changing of workspace, this can be disabled from the Workspaces menu in RC3+, as can the showing of the workspace indicator widget from the Configuration/Desktop submenu. With regards to the xoblite/bb4win Workspaces handling, note that this is not the same as similar functionality nowadays (read: I think, I don't use either much tbh) provided by Windows itself, however it does have the benefit of the broader bb4win ecosystem, including flexible control (e.g. bro@ms, @Script...) etc. Configuring xoblite.workspaces.names: works, but please note that this is a universal setting i.e. it needs to be configured in the xoblite.rc of the Default theme (i.e. the xoblite.rc in the same folder as the .exe), which in addition to the theme settings as such also hold all universal (i.e. non theme-specific) settings.
Seems to be very stable, fast and does also render a lot of programs I had problems until now. My issues are as follows:
- The title of a new window does not always appear in the toolbar. This is currently not reliable at all. In many cases my toolbar doesn't show a single window, it's just empty while I have several windows open.
Reliable is it only when I close blackbox.exe completely while I have other windows open and then I start blackbox.exe again (this is different from Restart in the menu). In this case I see indeed three or four windows in the toolbar.
- I have no tray icons. And I don't see how to achieve this. Is this concept gone?
- In many cases the menu remains open (even with open submenus) while I thought it should have been closed now. Again and again I see myself closing the menu by ESC.
- I miss a menu on the middle mouse button (or similar) showing the current tasks on the actual workspace. This is especially needed as long as the toolbar doesn't show all the windows. And the way to the Workspace submenu is long ...
- Common Windows keys like Alt-Tab and Alt-F4 seem not to work at all. Do I have to configure them as a hot key?
- bbZero had an option "Focus follows mouse", I used this normally. The window where you put the mouse on gets the focus whitout clicking. I miss this a lot.
- bbZero had an option which allowed the user to maximize a window without occupying the toolbar, at the moment maximizing a window either overwrites the toolbar completely or the toolbar overwrites the window's title bar which is also problematic
- bbZero allowed the user to move a window on the same position in another workspace by a context menu entry in the toolbar or on the window title bar, at the moment neither the toolbar nor the window title bar do provide this context menu, the only way to move a window is dragging by mouse
Sorry for the long list, don't want to crab.
No worries, better to ask in case someone out there has answers! I think others or I have explicitly or implicitly answered most of your questions above or in previous posts (if not, and if you haven't discovered solutions yourself, feel free to ask again). Regarding "opaque window moving", "focus follows mouse" and other similar legacy functions, I got rid of them a while back as at least some of them are nowadays more easily configurable in Windows settings. To be honest I don't recall if there's an equivalent Windows setting for focusing nowadays too though? (nb. it'd be easy to add it back, but I don't want to preserve bloated/overlapping functions if already covered by other means). As for moving a window to another workspace, I believe there is a bro@m to do that (can't check atm unfortunately), which you could then map to a hotkey (no btw, xoblite doesn't have any taskbar item context menus). More on maximizing windows vs "work area" further below.
----- Stay tuned for part 3 -----
BR//Karl aka qwilk/@xoblite