Could someone please tell me how i could gain access to the bookmark drop bar by LEFT-clicking the bookmark icon instead of RIGHT-clicking it?

Am only familiar so far with the traditional skin system.
If you're using one of those (e.g. Klassik), open the toolbars.cfg in current skin folder (Edit>Config.>Toolbars)
And exchange this

bookmarks(Edit)|&Bookmarks
with
rebarmenu(&Bookmarks)|&Bookmarks

If I got it right, for KM74/75 a second working way is to just delete the left part:

&Bookmarks

I'd also adjust the tooltip text in next line (free text)
And add a comment line just to remember the change and look it up later, example
## default is: bookmarks(Edit)|&Bookmarks
By the way the same system works also for favorites and hotlist.

A few tips for alternative skin button actions can also be found in the toolbars.cfg of classiria-skins.

Have now tried to figure it out for the new default system, but so far no luck. That's getting kinda complicated

First made a copy of the whole folder and then copied the default toolbars config into it (from KM/browser/defaults/settings).
Activated this new skin in F2>GUI
Changing the button *action* is feasable, same change as in traditional change, but could absolutely not manage to get an icon to show for it.
Tried with and without rebarmenu, with and without @ for the menu.
Tried editing skin.cfg, with and without rebarmenu, no chance.
Tried adding a traditional bmp-line in the toolbars.cfg. Tried adding 3.
Tried adding 1 bmp line in ALL buttons of this toolbar, and size after toolbar name.
Running out of ideas...

Also just noticed how tough it is for less trained computer users to add new bookmark folders.
When using the add-function, there is no option for it. But neither in the Edit function.
Not even clicking on the "Help" button there gives a tip how.

That help text is missing a lot of important info, especially also how to *search* for a bookmark. Had posted suggestions for that Help months ago, but of course now forgotten the rest of it again...

Quote
siria
Have now tried to figure it out for the new default system, but so far no luck. That's getting kinda complicated sad smiley

First made a copy of the whole folder and then copied the default toolbars config into it (from KM/browser/defaults/settings).
Activated this new skin in F2>GUI
Changing the button *action* is feasable, same change as in traditional change, but could absolutely not manage to get an icon to show for it.
Tried with and without rebarmenu, with and without @ for the menu.
Tried editing skin.cfg, with and without rebarmenu, no chance.
Tried adding a traditional bmp-line in the toolbars.cfg. Tried adding 3.
Tried adding 1 bmp line in ALL buttons of this toolbar, and size after toolbar name.
Running out of ideas...

The converting of a skin to the new method is easy only the second time. Before you do anything to a cfg file, you must attend to the graphics. I will use Klassic as an example.

In Klassic there three images which hold the images for the main bar. They are toolcold.bmp, toolhot.bmp, and tooldead.bmp. They will be much easier to use if they are one image. Use a graphics program which will allow you to create a vertical image strip. Add the images in the order, top to bottom, COLD, HOT, DEAD. Give the image a name. I used "tools0.bmp". There are other images that you might change, but I won't describe them all.

Now we can see how this new image is used in the skin. This is just two buttons from the main bar in Klassic.

&Main Bar{

	Back{
	ID_NAV_BACK
	Go back one page
	toolhot.bmp[0]
	toolcold.bmp[0]
	tooldead.bmp[0]
	}

	Forward{
	ID_NAV_FORWARD
	Go forward one page
	toolhot.bmp[1]
	toolcold.bmp[1]
	tooldead.bmp[1]
	}

Here are the same two buttons in Klassic2.

&Main Bar{

	Back{
	navBack|SHistoryBack
	Go back one page
	}

	Forward{
	navForward|SHistoryForward
	Go forward one page
	}

The connection to the images is now handled in the skin.cfg file. This is part of mine from Klassic2. The size is 21 because that is the size of the throbber. The images in tools0.bmp are 16x16.

The connection between skin.cfg and toolbars.cfg is the command. It can be a command name, Command ID, or a macro. Some images may be asssociated with multiple commands. One such multiple is "["macros(Home)", "navHome"],".

Here is part of my Klassic2 skin.cfg file.

{
  "version":1,
	"width":21,
	"height":21,
	"lists": [
    {
      "images":[ { "name": "tools0.bmp", "width":16, "height":16 } ],
      "commands": [
        "navBack",
        "navForward",
        "navStop",
        "navReload",
        ["macros(Home)", "navHome"],
        ["navSearch","macros(Search)"],
        "filePrint",
        ["bookmarks(Edit)", "favorites(Edit)", "hotlist(Edit)", 
         "bookmarks(Add)", "bookmarks(AddLink)",
         "favorites(AddLink)", "hotlist(AddLink)"],
        "",
        "",
        "",
        "",
        "macros(Places_History)",
        ["macros(Mail_ReadMail)", "&Mail And News"],
        "",        
        "",
        ["macros(Go_Selected)", "navGo"],
        "macros(Go_Up)",
        ""
      ] 
    },

I will stop now and you can tell me if I have helped or been totally redundant.

In general helpful of course, just in this specific case Rain wanted a menu on left on a button. We don't know yet which skin system he uses. No prob with the oldone.

But with the NEW skin system the ICON vanishes for menu-buttons.
Any trick to add an icon for a MENU via skin.cfg??

For simple users the old system is really far easier to customize, all button stuff together in a few lines. Can just see them giving up instantly when needing a changed icon.

Quote
siria
In general helpful of course, just in this specific case Rain wanted a menu on left on a button. We don't know yet which skin system he uses. No prob with the oldone.

I don't want to MOVE the Favorites/Bookmark button from it's initial position, i'm just used to open my bookmarks by Left-clicking them, not by Right-Click, i apoligise if i made it sound differently.

I'm using the default skin found in the latest version of K-Meleon along with the update Dorian provided a couple of days ago.

I have gone over the documentation as best that I can, but I cannot find a way to call a menu except from the menu system. I will keep looking.

James, calling a menu is easy and works fine, as written already (my first post above, same way works for old and new skins).
The prob is another one: the new system shows NO ICON for it.

Rain - no idea when I made it sound like moving. Sure didn't mean it either. Your preferred way just happens to be exactly my own one too

The trouble is that your current (default) skin is built in a brandnew way and we have a bit trouble figuring out how you could keep the icon after exchanging the action on that button. Modifying it to show the menu with left-click works fine, as described above - as long as you don't mind having a 'secret' transparent button :cool:
There are now several options:
- Dorian shows up and explains that it's all quite easy and how to do it
- or you switch to the traditional skin system, which requires adding all pics manually again in your toolbars.cfg - quite some work.
- or switch to the old default skin AuraAlpha from older KM version
- or we try adding the icon with a little workaround-macro
- or you enable the bookmarks-toolbar to see the bookmarks list by left-click (without Edit/Options), and pull it to a width of ~2cm



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 02/25/2015 11:47PM by siria.

@ siria

The method you noted in your first post only works in the old skin system. It is a feature or quirk that goes against the documentation.

Looks like Dorian did not put "menu" items as one of the things which may be used to link the image to the toolbar. It seems that only command names, Command IDs, and macros will work currently.

Maybe he can change that. I just don't know.

P.S. I tried workaround macro. No luck there. There seems to be no method to call a menu, Favorites() or F&vorites, from a macro.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/26/2015 03:00AM by JamesD.

Had tried it with rebarmenu on Vista, pressing the button did then work as expected, like in old skins.
Basically "rebarmenu" was invented to turn a menu into a plugin command.

It works!

I guess I am not too old to learn new things after all. Thanks to Siria for bringing rebarmenu plugin to my attention. I have used KM for many years and this is the first time I have used rebarmenu.

One new file and changes required to two existing files. Please note that I use Favorites and not Bookmarks. The method should work for both.

LeftFav.kmm

#  K-Meleon Macros (http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php?id=MacroLanguage2)

# ---------- LeftFav.kmm   ------------------------------------------------------------
# ---------- Uses the rebarmenu plugin to have Favorites display from
# ---------- a left click on the button which called this macro.
# ---------- 
_LeftFav {
plugin(rebarmenu, "F&avorites" );
}
$macroModules=$macroModules."LeftFav;";

Change to skin.cfg file.

        ["bookmarks(Edit)", "favorites(Edit)", "hotlist(Edit)", 
         "bookmarks(Add)", "bookmarks(AddLink)", "macros(_LeftFav)", 
         "favorites(AddLink)", "hotlist(AddLink)"],

Change to toolbars.cfg file.

	
%ifplugin favorites
	Favorites{
	macros(_LeftFav)
        view Favorites menu. 
	}
%endif

Quote
siria
Rain - no idea when I made it sound like moving. Sure didn't mean it either. Your preferred way just happens to be exactly my own one too

These things are out of my league, and besides, the way i see it, with every version that comes out this edditing/macro thing seems either to work partially or none at all afterworths.

It's a shame really, K-Meleon is such a fast and wonderful light little browser, but when it comes to customizing it, unless you know a thing or two about macros and file editing, it's reduced to nothing but a simple hardly any customizations browser like Google Chrome...

I wish Dorian would choose a user interface/skin and stick with it, so this browser could evolve beyond it's appearence as well...

Don't be too hard. While this brandnew alternative skin configuration actually is a pure KM decision, nearly all other broken things after new versions are caused be Mozilla, making their gecko machine more and more less adjustable to other browsers. Rather have the impression they fully intentionally make it as hard as possible now!
And I understand it takes an incredible amount of time and struggling to get past all those new barriers. Even when I myself only dabble with simple user macros, that often takes far longer than it looks in the end.

My wish would be, as long as the new skins are so much more complicated to customize than the normal ones, that the default skin should be built in a traditional way again, and a secondary skin with the new system come along for demonstration and testing by advanced users.
And the default skins should all have their own folders, not named "default". We have to drop all sorts of custom buttons in there, which may overwrite the "default skin" and later cannot tell, which of all those images were native and which from the user.

Quote
siria
Rather have the impression they fully intentionally make it as hard as possible now!
And I understand it takes an incredible amount of time and struggling to get past all those new barriers. Even when I myself only dabble with simple user macros, that often takes far longer than it looks in the end.

I don't want to be too hard or to sound like a jerk towars Dorian and his fellow contributors, i'm just a bit disapointed that in the last few months it looks like there has been more work put into the GUI then K-Meleon's Core settings (tring to simplify the customization process)

Pardon my ignorance, but if the Gecko engine has become such a real pain to work with and implement in other browsers, why not make K-Meleon's transition to the Chromium/Blink engine?

I know it's going to take an enourmous amount of time and "man power" to do this, but in the end, won't it be easier for Dorian and other programmers to work with afterworths?

Quote
Rain
I don't want to be too hard or to sound like a jerk towars Dorian and his fellow contributors, i'm just a bit disapointed that in the last few months it looks like there has been more work put into the GUI then K-Meleon's Core settings (tring to simplify the customization process)

It does seem that way, but I think the GUI change now will make future work more easy to accomplish.

Dorian said the update 1 to KM 75 beta 3 was laying the groundwork for a release code version. I think that we will see more progress on core items now that the GUI is running.

Can you make sense of the code changes that I posted for Favorites? Just use the same technique for bookmarks. I will be glad to provide the code specific to bookmarks if you need it.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/26/2015 09:10PM by JamesD.

@ siria

I cannot think of a way to provide the left click for favorites and bookmarks without the user having to edit some files.

UNLESS, maybe if Dorian would agree to put the "macros(_LeftFav)" and "macros(_LeftBook)" items into skin.cfg and put commented out code into toolbars.cfg so the user would only have to change the #'s in the code from original to altered version. We would still need the _LeftFav and _LeftBook macros to exist in their own module or within main.kmm.

If that were done, the user would only need to edit one file - toolbars.cfg.

Hmm... KM75 now has a removebutton function, so an alternative might be to first delete the original button, then built a new one by macro. Then again, the toolbar names and image names might be different for different users. Perhaps not such a good idea...

Best would be if Dorian can fix it fully, so that rebarmenu can get icons. Then all menus could be added without needing extra macros. And a couple most frequent ones like fav-bookm-hotlist menus could then be added to skins.cfg out-of-the-box already.

But putting the menu as default would be best anyway.
How often do we ADD favorites, compared to opening+searching+editing together?
And the current favorites(Add) can neither rename nor choose a folder, so it will be replaced with a user macro anyway.
My skin has always had the menu on left-click and it never bothered me when adding a new fav. Because the other menu actions are far more frequent.

Quote
Rain
I wish Dorian would choose a user interface/skin and stick with it, so this browser could evolve beyond it's appearence as well...

Unfortunately it's more complicated as you see it.
The engines (Layout & ECMAScript) need a specific shell to work as a browser. The skin is only a component of the shell you can see.
You must keep the shell working with the APIs provided by Mozilla and the modifications of their code. So the changes you notice aren't made for fun nor because Dorian has too much free time on his fingers.

BTW, I'm clueless myself how to edit the new syntax for the skin.

Quote
siria
My wish would be, as long as the new skins are so much more complicated to customize than the normal ones, that the default skin should be built in a traditional way again, and a secondary skin with the new system come along for demonstration and testing by advanced users.

IMHO all the user has to do is to copy the AuraAlpha skin from KM-74 into the KM-75 skin folder. At least that's what I would do if I would use that skin.

Quote
siria
And the default skins should all have their own folders, not named "default". We have to drop all sorts of custom buttons in there, which may overwrite the "default skin" and later cannot tell, which of all those images were native and which from the user.

Correct me please if I'm wrong but I can't see how images dropped in the "default skin" can cause problems. Aren't they simply ignored?
However I agree that for simpleness keeping "default" for extra buttons/images would make sense.

Quote
Yogi
Correct me please if I'm wrong but I can't see how images dropped in the "default skin" can cause problems. Aren't they simply ignored?
However I agree that for simpleness keeping "default" for extra buttons/images would make sense.

If I should, by chance, use a name for an image in an extention that matches one existing for the "Default" skin, then when the 7z for the extention is extracted, it would overwrite the existing image and ruin the skin.

I agree with siria that the default skin should have a name other than "Default" and should be in it's own folder.

Changing the subject, does anyone know if any variable other than plugin which can be used in the %if - %else - %endif construct in the toolbars.cfg file? I can use "%ifplugin", but that will make the idea that I have very complex. It would require three dummy DLL files and a reboot for the user to be able to change the Favorite, Bookmark, or Hotlist button to use the left click.

Quote
JamesD
If I should, by chance, use a name for an image in an extention that matches one existing for the "Default" skin, then when the 7z for the extention is extracted, it would overwrite the existing image and ruin the skin.

I did a test with 7z. It asked me if I want to replace the existing file with the same name.
Anyway, we all agree that keeping "default" for extra images makes sense.

@rain
I understand what you're saying, but I'm currently working alone.

Recent work on skin and toolbar was to simplify the customization process (and to a lesser extend, extension integration), so that later, the confs file can be editable through an interface

Since a while, MFC has everything to make a customizable interface. Should I use it, and work on something something else? I'm sure nobody would like it, it uses registry to save settings (maybe this can be bypassed) and the interface is clunky.

Kmeleon is build around gecko. There are tons of webkit browser around, instead of rewriting 2/3 of kmeleon why not just use one of them? What james and siria said was true for 74, less for 75, and after trying FF36, this should be OK ... for now.

And above all else, I need a bit of fun when working on kmeleon, or where would I find the motivation to do it?

What would be the priority for you?


Now for your original question, you just do it like the compact menu.

Remove

bookmarks(Add)|

in toolbar.cfg (line 299)

and add at line 26 of skin.cfg:

, "@&Bookmarks"

I'll add it in the next release.

Quote
siria
Don't be too hard. While this brandnew alternative skin configuration actually is a pure KM decision, nearly all other broken things after new versions are caused be Mozilla, making their gecko machine more and more less adjustable to other browsers. Rather have the impression they fully intentionally make it as hard as possible now!

No, they're making thing more difficult for me (and embedders) by making things easier for them.

Quote
siria
My wish would be, as long as the new skins are so much more complicated to customize than the normal ones, that the default skin should be built in a traditional way again, and a secondary skin with the new system come along for demonstration and testing by advanced users.

It's not more complicated. I made a new AuraAlpha skin with what I had and I had to made it more complex than what it could be. KMeleon need a new skin but I'm not capable to do that. Moreover, I should write docs :p

Quote
siria
And the default skins should all have their own folders, not named "default". We have to drop all sorts of custom buttons in there, which may overwrite the "default skin" and later cannot tell, which of all those images were native and which from the user.

Forgot to tell about it but, there is a "shared" folder now.

Quote
Dorian

Forgot to tell about it but, there is a "shared" folder now.

I just tried "skins\shared" folder and it works quite well. Both Default and shared are available.

Quote
Dorian
And above all else, I need a bit of fun when working on kmeleon, or where would I find the motivation to do it?

Yes, i must admit, i didn't take the "fun" part into consideration, but you're right on that one.

Quote
Dorian
What would be the priority for you?

I've tried to put in a context to sound as harmless and offenseless as possible but i can't seem to acomplish that, so i'll have to remain silent on this one.

No harm done. It's always nice to see people sharing their love for kmeleon

I'm going to bypass the technical side of this issue for a moment (because it's a bit over my head, too) and tell the original poster the workaround that I've just tried:

1) In the view menu, bring up Toolbars and unlock them.

2) In that same submenu, enable the bookmarks bar and you'll see an icon at the left of that bar that works like you described: Left-clicking it shows the bookmarks and bookmark folders.

3) Now drag the bookmarks bar onto the main bar at the left side of the screen.

4) Shorten the bookmarks bar by dragging the right edge of it to the left until it's so short that all you can see is the icon I described.

5) Now lock the toolbars again. What you'll wind up with is the toolbar button I believe you wanted.

Unfortunately, there's no easy way to change the appearance of that button, but at least it's visible.

Another minor down side is that you won't be able to hide the chevron symbol (») at the right edge of the button. I'm ignoring it, because it doesn't take up much room. If you drag the bookmarks bar any narrower, that chevron is all you'll see. The button itself will be missing, but left-clicking the chevron will still pop up the bookmarks and bookmark folders, except without the edit and add commands.

Update: I forgot to mention that I had first removed the original bookmarks button from the main toolbar, and that required a minor edit of toolbars.cfg. Sorry about that!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/03/2015 06:28PM by foliator.

Quote
siria
Am only familiar so far with the traditional skin system.
If you're using one of those (e.g. Klassik), open the toolbars.cfg in current skin folder (Edit>Config.>Toolbars)
And exchange this

bookmarks(Edit)|&Bookmarks
with
rebarmenu(&Bookmarks)|&Bookmarks

If I got it right, for KM74/75 a second working way is to just delete the left part:

&Bookmarks

I'd also adjust the tooltip text in next line (free text)
And add a comment line just to remember the change and look it up later, example
## default is: bookmarks(Edit)|&Bookmarks

I tried your rebarmenu method in KM74, siria. and it worked, but the bookmarks menu came up in the wrong place, namely the middle of the screen, probably because that's where it appears in the main menu. Then I tried it with just &Bookmarks, as you suggested for KM74, and it worked perfectly! So much for my Shrinking Bookmarks Bar approach!

But then, I was only trying to help Rain work around the problem without having to edit configuration files.

Quote
foliator
Another minor down side is that you won't be able to hide the chevron symbol (») at the right edge of the button

Restore the original bookmarks button from the main toolbar, disable the bookmarks toolbar and there won't be any chevron symbol (») anymore.

In case you don't like the bookmarks button/icon from the main toolbar, edit the toolbar with an image editor and replace the button/icon with one of your like.