okay. so i have fidgeted around with getting windows explorer to open with my computer expanded instead of the useless my documents folder (my opinion). back in the old days of no-ls i made a shortcut with properties to do this. now in ls the theme.rc file usually has an entry for "file manager" and you put in the path to the file manager executable. i can edit this to point anywhere, but i cannot get it to work with the shortcut i made for explorer and i cannot seem to do a command line switch deal in the entry. any ideas?
wergeld
did you recycle after making the change? have you tried leaving it as $FileManager$ and running the app to edit evars.rc?
yes.
yes.
and yes.
the problem is that i dont think litestep likes to use shortcut files (ie Shortcut to Explorer.exe). if i leave it as %filemanager% in the evars.rc it points to explorer.exe and works but it wont take commandline tags. if i set %filemanager% to point to the shortcut i made with the command line parameters in it already it does nothing at all (no errors, just no response to File Manager execution from within any theme).
I am using Ashtafere's Insight 3.5 theme and in his theme.rc you can point the disk icon mouseclick to any executable really, so i point it at explorer.exe and try and attach extra paramaters i need but it does not work. so i tried to point it to the shortcut i made previously but to no avail. yes, i have checked that the shortcut works and it does if i doubleclick it from with an explorer window or if i use the "run" command window.
this is the commandline you need to use to get the My Computer section to open up:
C:\WINDOWS\EXPLORER.EXE /n, /e, ::{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}
several generic switches there then the big ol' string. is there possibly a registry edit i can do to force this for explorer.exe? i have searched and searched and cannot find one when googling. in fact it took several iteration searches to get this command line switch.
basically if i can get a postive answer to one of these three questions i am set:
1. how can ls open a shortcut?
2. how do you "pipe" parameters to an exe from within themes.rc?
3. what is the registry edit to force explorer to open in my computer?
you ask why this is a big deal? i never have anything in my documents, i have drives set up for certain media/file types and i could use without that one extra mouseclick to select my computer. also i am aware of many different file managers out there, i am just good at explorer..so familiar with its layout and i am old so i dont change easily =).
wergeld
If I define MyComputer as an evar, like so:
MyComputer "explorer.exe /n,/e,::{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}" ; use CLSID
then typing $mycomputer$ in lsxcommand opens up explorer with "my computer" expanded, as desired. If I set the click action for an xlabel to be $mycomputer$ it works fine, too. Same process should work for the theme you're using.
How are you specifying the evars - through an rc file, or a LOSI/Omar util?
It sounds to me like a quote issue - your switches are probably getting chopped off. I'm away from a computer with ls right now, so the best I can say is paste the line from evars.rc and the line from insight that launches explorer.
in Insights theme.rc file this is the line:
menu_fileOnLeftClick "C:\Windows\explorer.exe"
in my evars.rc it is this which is defined by the little Omar utility but editable in notepad:
FileManager "C:\WINDOWS\explorer.exe"
these both point to the actual explorer executable. if i put in the shortcut version, no dice.
it may be a matter of quotes. hate em. loathe em, but i have run it through an editor and it sees them as okay.
Boreas, ahhh! didnt think of that. you know you get so focused on one thing, that flipping the relations never occurs to you. will try that one out. thanks for the feedback, people. it helps a lot.
wergeld
messed around with Boreas' idea and it does not seem to work either through lsxcommand or from the click. if i use exactly what you pasted i get no action when clicking or writing in lsxc. if i put quotes around the parameters ls just reads it as explorer.exe and skips the rest.
these are my lines of code now:
evars.rc
MyComputer "explorer.exe /n,/e,::{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}"
theme.rc
menu_fileOnLeftClick "$mycomputer$"
getting closer though. what bugs me is that i can see the light at the end of the tunnel, just i cant tell if it receeding or approaching =).
wergeld
Try leaving the quotes off of this line instead:
menu_fileOnLeftClick "$mycomputer$"
I didn't quote $mycomputer$ when I typed it in lsxcommand, either.
Boreas, you are a god among men. it worked!
i only used the quotes because the other onleftclick events in the insight theme.rc where in quotes. finaly! a way to pipe parameters to "shortcuts" in ls. thanks a bunch.
pretty soon i could make my own theme...minus the art. i am codemonkey (despite this little hiccup) not an artmonkey.
again thanks for the help all of you.
wergeld
Yeah, it's not clear to me why extra quotes would break something, although problems with insufficient quoting are certainly understandable. Maybe jugg or rabidcow could explain that nuance a little better. They probably already have, somewhere in these forums.
aye. wonder when the forum search will be fixed. that would rock. so much to do so little time to hit "next page".....is there a catchall site with more in depth tutorials other than the "this is litestep, see it has bangs and modules" ones?
i think my next project will be some kind of ajax thing. i dig it, finaly a use for XML. i spend way too much time in php and c. even c# didnt excite me. and now i have this little side project i am doing for myself with litestep. ahh, life is good.
wergeld
Forum search works if you go to the top level of an individual forum first, e.g., General, Modules, Themes, etc. Then use the "search this forum" box.