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Rainmeter Menu Builder

Report bugs with the Rainmeter application and suggest features.
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kati42
Posts: 35
Joined: May 4th, 2009, 4:25 am

Rainmeter Menu Builder

Post by kati42 »

I think it'd be cool to have a way to build your own custom menu tree with Rainmeter, and this could be hooked to a mouseaction or button. Perhaps this needs to be a plugin that parses an XML description of the menu...

<menu name="Menu">
<submenu name="Applications">
<item="firefox" command="firefox.exe" />
<submenu name="Office">
<item="word" command="winword.exe" />
<item="powerpoint" command="powerpoint.exe" />
</submenu
<separator />
<item="thunderbird command="thunderbird.exe" />
</submenu
</menu>

Displaying the menu could be tied to a specific meter or the whole config. It'd be a way to get something like the cool context menu in Emerge Desktop without having to completely replace one's shell (or if someone is using Emerge, to have a different launcher for different purposes). Hopefully multiple menus could be defined, tied to different actions/objects, but that's secondary to me at least.

We can make something similar by hand-coding configs, but I would think this would be a useful time-saver.

For example, I have set up a way to display the current power profile for my laptop. I have figured out the command line to *change* the power profile also. I plan to make a second config that is a Power Profile Switcher, and show that config when clicking on the current Power Profile. It'd be much easier if I could define a menu like above with the different power options and clicking on the current Power Profile would open that menu. A lot less work.

Basic functionality like background color, separator color, text color, arrow color (for the tree) should be sufficient to make this very useful. Future development could include specifying icons and/or checkmarks (checkmarks set by measures), images, borders, etc. But the above is probably enough to help increase productivity and give *some* skinning ability.
dragonmage
Developer
Posts: 1270
Joined: April 3rd, 2009, 4:31 am
Location: NC, US

Re: Rainmeter Menu Builder

Post by dragonmage »

Funny you should suggest this, as I am currently in the process of hand coding menu configs, that people should be able to plug in to their own configs. They will of course still take some work on the part of the config author, but I'm trying to get the majority of the work done. It will be a template of sorts. I have a perfectly functional right click menu on my RecycleBin config, including two sub-menus. The only thing I haven't been able to code in is to make them "volatile" meaning they don't close automatically if you click somewhere else. I just included a small close button in the upper right corner to use if you decide after opening that you don't want to click on a menu item. Clicking on a menu item of course does auto close the menus.

I do agree, that a simpler method should be developed, and some of us have been discussing it in IRC. I will try to release my templates in the next week or two, so that people will have something to use until a different method is developed.

Welcome to the forum, btw. :)
kati42
Posts: 35
Joined: May 4th, 2009, 4:25 am

Re: Rainmeter Menu Builder

Post by kati42 »

Sounds good.

Thanks! Happy to be here...
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