Integrating the Rainmeter 'about' window information with VSCode

[raiguard]

I recently switched away from Sublime Text back to vscode (mostly because vscode has a custom not-ugly title bar - it's a stupid reason, I know), and I have been poking around with vscode's more IDE-like features. It made me wonder: would it be possible to integrate the Rainmeter about window's information with vscode's debugging features?

The main thing would be integrating the Rainmeter log with the debug console, so I don't have to have the about window open. This would be especially useful for developing with only one monitor. Other features could be monitoring measure and variable values in the debug interface. It would also be nice if I could refresh the current skin using a hotkey.

I have no idea how to do this or if it's even possible, I'm just throwing the idea out there. Does someone know if this is possible, and if so, could point me in the right direction to start figuring out how to go about it?

[theAzack9]

I recently switched away from Sublime Text back to vscode (mostly because vscode has a custom not-ugly title bar - it's a stupid reason, I know), and I have been poking around with vscode's more IDE-like features. It made me wonder: would it be possible to integrate the Rainmeter about window's information with vscode's debugging features?

The main thing would be integrating the Rainmeter log with the debug console, so I don't have to have the about window open. This would be especially useful for developing with only one monitor. Other features could be monitoring measure and variable values in the debug interface. It would also be nice if I could refresh the current skin using a hotkey.

I have no idea how to do this or if it's even possible, I'm just throwing the idea out there. Does someone know if this is possible, and if so, could point me in the right direction to start figuring out how to go about it?

Funny you would talk about this. (I am kinda working on an extention, although very slowly...)

It should certainly be possible to get the log if you set Logging to "Log to file" in the Settings tab. Then you can just read the log file and show that in the vscode section.

You should be able to read the Rainmeter.ini in order to get active skins as that is updated directly when a skin is loaded / unloaded. You can use the skin information for reloading aswell by sending a bang to the rainmeter .exe. (An example being "C:\Program Files\Rainmeter\Rainmeter.exe" "!Refresh <config>")

For such an extension would getting the measure and variable data probably be the most interesting for debugging purposes. I can't really think of any ways to get these values though as Rainmeter doesn't really expose them in any way i know of. :/ Being able to get the option values for every meter and measure would also be very useful, but idk how to do this either without knowing the measures / meters in the skin. ( You could probably manually parse the skin, but that sounds messy to do... It might be possible tho)

External Plugins can be found in %appdata%/rainmeter/plugins while internal plugins can be found in the install directory in the plugins folder.

This will certainly be tricky to implement if you want to support portable versions of Rainmeter, but i hope this gives you the pointers you where looking for.