Hello, I have a couple of questions which whilst Litestep related - may very well wind up having nothing to do with litestep.

I think one of the weaknesses of using an xPopup to manage all of your programs and stuff is that if you want to change it, you have to get into the popup file, add a line for your new entry in the relevent place, extract the icon from the exe using an external app (I place it in c:\icons) and then fill in the Icon/Name/Path of the entry. I would assume, that in all the time people have been using litestep, someone would have come up with a better way of handling this. I was thinking something like a simple VB program that you could edit the popup in, in a simple graphical way - so you could like click to add an item, browse to the file - it would automatically check if you have that icon in your icons directory, and if not it would extract it fo you. Then when you apply the changes or whatever it would write the needed line into your popup file. It would obviously open out in full folders, with the ability to change the order and in which subfolder it's in etc.

I would just like to get away from the grind that is associated with such a simple process, and one that if you weren't a Litestepper wouldn't annoy you to use.

So, does something like this already exist or is it feasible in any way?

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Also, I would quite like to have a hotkey that terminates, and then restarts the litestep process. Obviously this could not be done with a hotkey in litestep because I intend to use this as crash recovery, so litestep probably won't be responding at the time.

Is there another small program or windows function that would allow me to assign a function like this? (terminate and start the litestep.exe).



Thank you for reading! For me, some things like this would really make Litestep an even better experience, and I think the popup thing would be a great utility or something to distribute with installers, as I'm sure there are many newbs and lazy people who would like to take advantage of this simplification.

There is the LiteStepPopupEditor. http://lspe.sourceforge.net/
I have never used it, and have no idea how well it works...

Just use a third party hotkey app to restart LS. I use HotkeyControlXP, but there are many out there. You can kill LS with the built-in ctrl-alt-f1 menu, or you could define a hotkey in the external app to send the appropriate bang command[s].

1) You don't need to extract the icon manually, you can just use the DynamicFolders and it will work just fine in getting the default icon if you turn icons on.

2) You can use !Execute [!Quit][c:\litestep\litestep.exe] I believe. I have it setup at home to do a hard disable, I'll repost later if it is different.

3) Read the docs on the hotkey module loaded by your theme. It will probably be hotkey.dll or jkey.dll.

Thanks,

I haven't looked into LSPE yet - but about using bangs to quit litestep.... Would the bangs function when litestep itself has frozen? Or would it just be one of the things to do once/if it starts working again?

If LiteStep is frozen you can't do anything, you can't even get to the "Oh Shit!" menu. The only thing you can do is kill it with the task manager and restart. I have had problems with certain modules though and that is why I have the "Hard Recycle" option. If the LS core isn't frozen though, you can do the !Quit followed by the start as stated above. It will spawn both commands one after the other but it will try and start LS before the !Quit gets processed.

I guess I was just looking for an external to litestep way of setting up a hotkey to terminate the litestep process - basically to automatically call the function that is exectuted when you use the task manager to kill a process... And then once it's done that to restart the litestep.exe - so as I would see it this would all need to be done externally. If this was set up then instead of HAVING to use the task manager, you could just hit a hotkey and it would sort out the rest for you - admittedly its only benefit would be timesaving and the illusion of greater stability ;).

Presumably this must be possible?


Oh, and LSPE seems to crash every time I try to import a popup - as in it illegal operations before I can even browse to find a popup...

Thanks for your time.

You can get an external shell manager you can get what you want. HOWEVER...you will loose most of your tray icons as they are managed by LS. You really should go out and find out what is causing your LS to lock-up. Start by disabling all but the "core" LS modules and walking forward enabling one at a time to see which is causing your issue.

Use an external hotkey program, like Brian said, and have it run the following...

1. %windir%\system32\taskkill /im litestep.exe /f
2. pause of some kind
3. c:\litestep\litestep.exe

Here, I threw this together for kicks: ls_restart.exe

CTRL + SHIFT + R will kill the litestep.exe process and restart litestep.exe. If litestep.exe isn't running, it will just start it.
CTRL + SHIFT + Q will quit ls_restart.exe.
Running ls_restart.exe /? will remind you of the above. :P

If you want it to start with windows, just put a shortcut to it in your startup folder.

Wow, thanks xcal - I tried that app you wrote, however I just get the error: "Program too big to fit in memory", on a relatively new laptop...

After I've got some sleep I'll look at the hotkey program method.

Very odd. Works perfect for me. It's a really tiny app, so something else must be going on. What OS? Do you get the error when starting it, or when trying to use one of the hotkeys?

I tried CTRL + SHIFT + R and it just reloaded this page. ;)

Well, that was before I started ls_restart.exe actually. It worked fine afterwards, but it is using ~4MB of RAM, which seems a bit much since my external hotkey app only uses 1.3 MB. "Program too big to fit in memory" is definitely a stretch though!

Ya, a proper hotkey app written in C would be much better for ram usage. I'm just using an interpreted language which packages the script/interpreter in the .exe.