Rainmeter Forums

Active Colors wrote: ↑January 14th, 2022, 12:27 pm Long story short:

Right now when Rainmeter is already running and when you try launching Rainmeter.exe it will do nothing.
It would be useful when you open Rainmeter.exe it could open Manage window when Rainmeter is already running.
It is also very simple and intuitive versus command line.
In some cases I might just need to simply open Manage window without touching any skins or system tray while Rainmeter is running.
Especially useful when things break and you have no access to taskbar/tray or skins, or when you run some complex skin that interferes with taskbar and does not give you a Manage option in its context menu.



Long story:

During some skin tests I got into a janky situation when my taskbar became inaccessible and I had no skins visible on desktop.
I needed to get into the Manage window in order to change some things to fix the situation but I simply could not because I was cut off from the taskbar and from any skins.
Due to a slight panic, even being familiar with Rainmeter for 10+ years it took a while to recall that Rainmeter supports command line bangs and I used "C:\Program Files\Rainmeter\Rainmeter.exe" !Manage to open the Manage window.
Restarting Rainmeter would not fix it as my issue was due to my skins.
Of course I could edit/restore Rainmeter.ini but it takes more steps that simply opening the Manage window and this kind of issue did not require messing with Rainmeter.ini.

Therefore, I think simply opening Manage window by running Rainmeter.exe when Rainmeter is already running would be a useful feature in many janky cases that could help avoid restarting computer, restarting Rainmeter or editing/restoring Rainmeter.ini
It could happen to anyone, especially it would be nasty if this happens to someone with little Rainmeter knowledge who can easily get panicked and might not be aware of Rainmeter.ini or command line bangs.
Even nowadays there are complex skins that hassle with Explorer by hiding taskbar and have custom context options with no Manage option (and due to being complex they have a higher potential to break stuff), so, for some beginner users it could be quite stressful to understand how to manage Rainmeter when they have no visible access to the basic thing like the Mange window.
And as always, things break.

death.crafter wrote: ↑January 14th, 2022, 1:30 pm Make a shortcut
"C:\Program Files\Rainmeter\Rainmeter.exe" "!Manage"

Active Colors wrote: ↑January 14th, 2022, 1:46 pm Yeah I can do that but I think any extra steps can be omitted by adding what I have described. Besides that is not only for me and other users can benefit from it too.

eclectic-tech wrote: ↑January 14th, 2022, 2:35 pm This is not a bad idea, but there are other alternatives that are already available (a shortcut as D.C. suggested) and there is also the Safe Start feature if Rainmeter has crashed.

Active Colors wrote: ↑January 14th, 2022, 8:10 pm Well, the idea is just to open the Manage window in a simple, fast, and as obvious as possible way.
Safe Start is good when things crash. But I don't want to use Safe Start when I know that some particular things can be simply fixed with Manage.