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XYstylEZ - Visual Themes for your XYplorer, made easy

Posted: 03 Mar 2014 16:50
by SkyFrontier
*intro rewritten, as promised*

The attached script is a collection of Visual Themes for XYplorer. For the Theme Creation &
Management Tools, please scroll down to this post.
Direct download = http://www.xyplorer.com/xyfc/download/file.php?id=4918.

27 of them. Productivity, stylish, presentation-modes - your choice!

Like this:
z_stripH150_26_27_2014-03-03_235841.jpg
z_stripH150_26_27_2014-03-03_235841.jpg (24.97 KiB) Viewed 20782 times
They were created by hand then exported using a tool I'm yet to publish, whose sole purpose
is to make easy to store and share such themes and in a few clicks. There's more,
but I'm gathering feedback so I post all of them at once, bugs fixed, etc.

The basic idea is to easily streamline the process of exporting such themes,
share them and quickly change then (as you already can see in the attached file!).

*How to use it?*

-download and unrar the attachment;
-open it with your favorite .txt handler program, select all content, copy it;
-in XYplorer, go to Scripting > Run Script..., paste the script there, press ok;
-voilá - 27 visual themes to choose from. *Restart of XYplorer will be required!* (script will do it
automatically after some prompting);
-you can then create a User Button (best method) to easily access it, a User-Defined Command, an Alias...

Alternatively, paste this into your address bar and press enter, then read the Help topic on Script Files:

::help "idh_scripting.htm#idh_scripting_xys";

(Also, take a look at 'User-Defined Buttons' or 'User-Defined Commands' entries, if you're not familiar to these terms.)

From now on, each time you need to change a Visual Theme, just click the button (or..., or... - XY freedom!),
pick a theme and have yourself free of eye-boredom!

-Please I *need* feedback on this:

1. do you plan to use the theme-creation tool?

2. is there any flaw/comment on the used method for building themes you'd like to share?

3. would you share your themes with community?

Some settings regarding style (for instance, Tree Path Tracing color & style) I decided to include on the
created themes as, if ignored, they tend to ruin the theme as a whole.

So far the only concern I have is Folder View Settings: at first it seemed like a good idea to include this
setting on themes but now I see it's not a simple thing. The theme-creation tool no more generates FVS-aware
themes, ie, changing themes will keep current setting (ON/OFF) of FVS. I'm still analyzing other aspects of
theme creation to include/exclude them on the published version, and that's why I need some comments.

By the way, these are the names of the themes - with some notes:

0 - Alone In The Dark - sometimes all you need is *FOCUS*
1 - Barbie Said Hello
2 - BBenneettoonn
3 - Benetton Girl
4 - Big White Cloud
5 - Bleuesque - so peaceful...
6 - Chocolate Wanna Bee
7 - Chopin
8 - Default Whitey - it's always good to have a safe place to go back to
9 - Doc Holliday In The Woods - good for presentations*; a really disturbing theme! =)
A - Gray Matters
B - Gray Matters, v2
C - Green Techie - great for eye-strain; thinking on a variant where p1 (and tree?) = p2 (lighter)
D - Happiness In Blue
E - Marine
F - Mr. Brownie
G - Red Eyed - reported as great for eye-strain
H - Shampain - just love this one!
I - Snow Storm Over Alaska - good for presentations*
J - Solaris - one of my favorites!
K - Spookhouse - good for presentations*
L - Sunny
M - Surrender
N - Terminal 3 - my default theme for years, in its v2 (sad days I couldn't easily change themes...)
O - White Old - no great difference from theme 8, default; will go
P - XYish - try it with bold font (tools, configuration, fonts, main contents) for a better effect...
Q - Stripes and Stuff

I also created two other presentation-mode themes, 'Ying' and 'Yang', which with lucky I may include in this post update.

Tip:
Want to get rid of FVS (Folder View Settings)-changing when theme-swapping?
Search and replace (by nothing) all
setkey "1", "FolderSpecificSettings", "Settings", "$iniTRGT";
and
setkey "0", "FolderSpecificSettings", "Settings", "$iniTRGT";
lines on the XYstylEZ.xys file.

________
* by 'good for presentations' I mean: themes that will allow you to, with more or less difficult, bring your
file manager into the big screen with minimal-to-none exposition of your non-relevant folders/file names.

Enjoy!

;)

Re: XYstylEZ - Visual Themes for your XYplorer, made easy

Posted: 03 Mar 2014 17:50
by binocular222
Need a menu line to "Save current theme as... some ini file".
Here is my script

Re: XYstylEZ - Visual Themes for your XYplorer, made easy

Posted: 03 Mar 2014 18:51
by SkyFrontier
The script generator reads info on src ini, then exports it as each theme saved, like in the attached file.

Re: XYstylEZ - Visual Themes for your XYplorer, made easy

Posted: 03 Mar 2014 23:14
by SkyFrontier
Plz FILE/SETTINGS SPECIAL/SAVE CONFIG AS prior to 1st use as themes tweak minor stuff.
Main does this. Themes: planned.

Re: XYstylEZ - Visual Themes for your XYplorer, made easy

Posted: 05 Mar 2014 05:58
by SkyFrontier
Classy set that Night Mode of yours, huh, binoc?
Had to adjust a thing or two to fully appreciate the xys, but worth it.

Re: XYstylEZ - Visual Themes for your XYplorer, made easy

Posted: 05 Mar 2014 09:14
by binocular222
I combine yours and mine into this script:
- Usage: Extract to <xyscript>, then run
- The last menu line "Save as" will save your current theme to <xyscript>\Theme\*.ini => Pretty easy to share people's theme.

P.S: Night Mode is inspired by Maxthon. I love its Night Mode so much.
OT: How to get current script's path? I want to inprove the first line to set $ThemeFolder to be relative to current .xys

Re: XYstylEZ - Visual Themes for your XYplorer, made easy

Posted: 05 Mar 2014 12:02
by RalphM
binocular222 wrote:OT: How to get current script's path? I want to inprove the first line to set $ThemeFolder to be relative to current .xys
There's the variable <xyscripts> which returns the path to the scripts folder of the current instance.

Re: XYstylEZ - Visual Themes for your XYplorer, made easy

Posted: 05 Mar 2014 12:31
by TheQwerty
RalphM wrote:
binocular222 wrote:OT: How to get current script's path? I want to inprove the first line to set $ThemeFolder to be relative to current .xys
There's the variable <xyscripts> which returns the path to the scripts folder of the current instance.
There's also the Self SC.

Re: XYstylEZ - Visual Themes for your XYplorer, made easy

Posted: 05 Mar 2014 21:15
by SkyFrontier
Post 1 updated:
-why
-how
-rar themes index
-themes added
-important note on FVS
-other notes.

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Re: XYstylEZ - Visual Themes for your XYplorer, made easy

Posted: 06 Mar 2014 20:21
by aurumdigitus
@ SkyFrontier -

Well it appears that Search should have been done first after all!

Script with 2500 lines of code. Now that is love from a dedicated user.

Have downloaded files and read instructions carefully. But before attempting to fire this puppy up where is the "Fail-Safe"? I.e. how to return to Default values? Or is that where "Plz FILE/SETTINGS SPECIAL/SAVE CONFIG AS prior to 1st use" comes in? Seems like it should be part of script. A newbie could have trouble here.

Noted posting on March 3. Thank you for the gift as that happened to be my birthday. :appl:

If this works as advertised, Don you're off the hook on the Themes wish. :P

Re: XYstylEZ - Visual Themes for your XYplorer, made easy

Posted: 07 Mar 2014 03:17
by binocular222
Backup your xyplorer.ini before use.

Or you can use my Theme.zip attached in a few posts above.

Re: XYstylEZ - Visual Themes for your XYplorer, made easy

Posted: 07 Mar 2014 05:23
by SkyFrontier
Binocular, may I have your permission to include a variant on NiteM, named 'Night Mode by Binocular,v2', on future sets?

Re: XYstylEZ - Visual Themes for your XYplorer, made easy

Posted: 07 Mar 2014 05:32
by SkyFrontier
Aurum: there's no short answer and I WILL give you a decent, asap.But: copy your whole xy folder and try there, why not?

Re: XYstylEZ - Visual Themes for your XYplorer, made easy

Posted: 07 Mar 2014 06:58
by binocular222
SkyFrontier wrote:Binocular, may I have your permission to include a variant on NiteM, named 'Night Mode by Binocular,v2', on future sets?
Yes, but no need to include my name in the theme

Re: XYstylEZ - Visual Themes for your XYplorer, made easy

Posted: 07 Mar 2014 15:45
by SkyFrontier
@binocular222:

Got it, thanks!

@aurumdigitus:

Thanks, thanks...
Uh!, I'm a march-ian, too! (19)
Concerning your worries: yes, I've mentioned on that same post you quoted that I am aware of that*.
That's the reason why I included two 'default' themes (will remove the 'old' one from the
final themes set). But as always, I was not happy.

Well...
-BOTH main AND THEMES (yes!, themes! I finally made it!) will have safety nets as they:
1. backup current ini on first run;
2. backup the original theme on first run;
3. >backup the last used theme< as a last resource, on each run of either themes tool or themes.
...among other stuff... ; )

I think that should suffice... enough... even for my paranoi..., errrr... 'taste'. ^^

I really dislike creation of extra files on installation/execution of programs/scripts, but those
3 files** are key to my concept of config-protection themes.

As of now, the best way to play safe is manually saving your current ini as described. Other than that,
you're good to go. (current custom theme, if any, will be lost, but that's only a matter of loading
the backup ini again. Binocular222 published a "save themes" function which I haven't properly tested -
that may save your hide either, can't say for sure - as far as I can tell, my tool will be able to
retrieve info even from the .inis created by his tool)

Hmmm... by the way, HAPPY BIRTHDAY! Sweet Lady Luck smiles! (And enjoy your other gift when it comes... lol)

-I'm holding up publishing the tool as I'm eagerly waiting for comments because *NOW* is the time
to set up the main script. As it involves a VERY-complicated script template creation ( :!: Don could help
a lot adding a way to heredoc syntax being NOT resolved at all - even self() ruins templates when it
comes to heredoc!), I'd like to have everything fine tuned prior to releasing something that's pretty
(I mean, ULTRA-pretty!) hard to update on my side.

(Don't know if that makes you feel comfort but I'm playing with all posted themes without any hitch.
The only thing I disliked was the FVS setting/unsetting, which I covered in the updated post on how
to deal with it in the meantime.)

An idea is that you clone you current XY folder and integrate the script in there, thus you'll see
*what would really happen* on your installment instead of using a fresh, default one - just to see
the script failing in your actual work box, *IF* that would be the case.

All in all, yes, it works as advertised (the posted .rar/.xys) - and will work for everyone which wants
not only to publish a single but entire theme sets, when the themes tool arrive!
30 downloads in 3 days and not a single complaint (not even on the FVS setting***!) may mean a thing...

A word on skinning: I'd prefer XY fully skinnable than only theme-able. Full skinning allow easy
integration whatever scenario it's put into play, not to mention the obvious easy setting on
what-next-brave-new-OS looks.

____________________
*"Main does this. Themes: planned."
**z_XYstylEZ_1stRunStyleBKP.txt, z_XYstylEZ_LastUsedThemeBKP.txt and z_XYstylEZbkp_<your ini name>.ini
***there's only one theme with FVS off, so this tells me *everybody uses it*, default as it comes, at least.