Ok, so I've had this idea for a Litestep editor. I've mentioned it here a few months back. LSTM seems to have gotten a hell of a headstart on me, and my program doesn't look or run as nicely as their's does, but I think I have a sort of an advantage, because mine is not text based persay. Hell, maybe eventually they can incoporate what I've done into their editor and we can all be happy.

Anycase, right now I'm in the works of taking a simple theme I downloaded, and bit by bit recreating it in my editor in my format (hitting the build button puts it in the .rc format). This process is going to require some gruntwork. I was wondering if I could call on any of you that are interested in this at all to help me with some of it. Once I have a working demo, and assuming it is recieved well, I'll probably ask for your help again, in development as well as grunt work.

Perhaps I'm being selfish or arogant here, but I don't want to give away too many details of how this thing works right now. (I've never released software before really, so I might be going about this wrong, forgive me) It's not complicated or anything, but I'll just say that it's not really text based, it has visual editing, and I claim that this is flexible enough to accompany any module that might come up, at least to some degree. If you're interested, let me know. Email me and I'll give you more details as to how this works and what help I'm looking for.

EDIT:
one thing, I prefer to be able to talk to you over IM. And I guess I sortof forgot to say that my slightly more longterm goal here is to make a team for this thing.

You mean you want to sell it?

you're kidding me. No, I just don't want someone "stealing" my idea (again, sorry for sounding arogant). Of course it will be free once it's made.

cool, good luck

I still wonder how a text based config file can be generated from a non text based application

Maybe I'm describing it badly. For example it uses some dialog boxes. You set certain things in it, and text is generated accordingly. You can put this text wherever you want in whatever rc file. By not text based I meant that it's not a text editor, it's a GUI. Does that clear it up at all?

DeViLbOi; It's been going on for eons. Look at .ini files :)

Maybe you don't understand how most non-texted based apps work. Almost all of them save information to text in some form, so it makes plenty of sense that someone could generate .rc files with a gui and a couple of questions to the user. If you can type it out, it can be automated.

If you havent, you should download any of the latest xlabel modules,
It comes with a Gui for configuring rc settings.
That might help you.

oilman: but that's not WYSIWYG like orlivion's editor... or neither is that one?

sryo: I understand that, you are correct.
my comment refered to his last post.

Quote: "By not text based I meant that it's not a text editor, it's a GUI"

orblivion: maybe you could clarify the WYSIWYG part being that is not mentioned on your post.(only on your signature)

such an editor with dialoges for each module is a hell of work. each and every module change, and the dialoge has to be updatet. also different versions of modules needs different settings.
My idea was to use the DLL itself for generating a dialoge, like a parser that checks each setting the module and generates a dialoge dynamical, but also this issn't possible, sadly), that's why I created a module cfg tool for our own modules like xlabel(light), xDesktop and xtaskbar. a few modules is not that hard to keep up to date.

oilman: from http://www.litestep.net/index.php?section=4&action=view&catId=1&id=3920


now we'll see a lot of crappy themes that wont work correctly... like now, but worse. :/

i wonder whether a WYSIWYG editor would make theme creation easier in terms that you don't have to type much. even using the wonderful xlabel cfg tool, you still need a lot of typing. i suppose we'll never have tools like this for all modules, especially not in a standard layout (so you could easily find your way through each of these), because modules differ too much (except from x, y, width, height and a few other settings). so as a result, there would probably be a lot of switching from mouse to keyboard and vice versa, which most people don't like (? i think :) ), and you would spend lots of time searching for the setting you need to modify right now. therefore at some point, it's faster again to simply type a setting, or comment something out, or whatever.

on the other side, there're always ways and ideas that people cannot even think of, or believe in. so i'm pretty curious about this editor and the way it works - keep up working. :)

Is that what all the clamour is about? I thought it was because people were afraid of an editor like that limiting customizability. I didn't think this was an issue.

As far as the WYSIWYG stuff, part of my editor includes a view of the screen where you can place visual elements such as pictures and squares and such. The values associated are the same ones that you would see in the dialog boxes. I haven't ironed out everything as far as how multiple objects will show at once and not get too cluttered.

Anyway, yeah, it's a hell of a lot of work. That's why I want to rely on people making the additions as they need them and submitting them, like with LSTM. And as far as multiple versions of modules, I guess that's something I haven't considered too much. For now I'll gloss over that.

My friend is advising me to mention that my editor doesn't insert extra crap like an HTML WYSIWYG editor would (meta tags, whatnot). Every piece of code generated for the rc corresponds to something the designer told it to put in there.

If you wanted, you could use the program to start your theme, and easily go in there afterwards with a text editor and patch things up, whereas with an HTML editor you usually need to use the same program again.

I think you should include a dev plugin for the guys who make the modules, if they can enter info about thier module it could plugin to the editor. That way forward module compatibility is not an issue. For example you want to use a new version of LSBox and it has new bangs you would simply copy lsbox5.cfg the a dir under the editor.

Heres another idea ... add a featureto automatically resize or reposition componants based on resolution to keep the theme proportioned no matter what res you run. maybe OS compatibilty based on modules, thats something the module writers could includ in plugins.

I can't program,but I can think up stuff for programmers to do :)

The sizing issue is in my considerations, though not my immediate considerations.