Editor for EmulationStation themes

[sfacuz]

Re: ES Theme Editor
The project of ES_Theme_Editor of chiribas10 seems to be quite old and abandoned.
It's a pity, even if it was ...not so userfriendly and cute, it's a good start for a good project.
All of us here need a simple and useful Editor for our ES Themes, don't we?
Come on guys! Let's do it...i'm starting to deal with it, but i'm not sure i will have the time to develop it.

[EctoOne]

To be honest, I don't think a Theme Editor is needed.
It is mostly about positioning elements on a canvas and from personal experience I only have some troubles with the <datetime> element because it doesn't fully support all available settings.
Also, EmulationStation has become very forgiving to errors. When I started tinkering with themes, any small error caused a crash. Now it will either use the default values or ignore broken elements.

A text editor with syntax highlighting and EmulationStation running in debug mode is enough for me.

I recently starting looking into themes for Kodi and they are way more complex than ES themes. I mean we basically just have image and text elements without barely any fancy customization and most stuff can be done with a single xml file.

My suggestion would be to find a theme that has a layout you like and change around some values to see what happens.

[mattrixk]

@ectoone said in Editor for EmulationStation themes:

My suggestion would be to find a theme that has a layout you like and change around some values to see what happens.

That's how I started. I loved Rookervik's original Pixel theme, but I wanted something that displayed metadata, so I started playing around with it and out popped MetaPixel (Rookervik graciously let me use his original awesome logos and console artwork).

I also wrote the Creating Your Own EmulationStation Theme tutorial in the Wiki to help people get started. RetroPie has evolved quite a bit in the year or 2 since it was written, and there is a bunch of stuff missing, but the basics are all still valid.

[hiulit]

I'm in favor of having an EmulationStation Theme Editor :)

[EctoOne]

Maybe I will create a very basic theme which will include all available elements with their available options set to the default values (if I can find them). With some comments, that might be a good starting point. I was thinking of that because I could really use one for Kodi right now.

[Cybrasty]

I would love a WYSIWYG theme editor. The reason why I am not making themes is because of the hassle of laying it out in xml. An editor, even a basic one for just for laying out elements in a GUI, would speed this process so much more.

Making a retropie theme easily might actually make me make me finish the series of synthwave 80s computers (of which I only made 2 so far, example here)and expand to consoles and arcade!

Edit: removed the huge graphic and made it a link instead

[EctoOne]

@EctoOne said in Editor for EmulationStation themes:

Maybe I will create a very basic theme which will include all available elements with their available options set to the default values (if I can find them). With some comments, that might be a good starting point. I was thinking of that because I could really use one for Kodi right now.

Would anyone be interested in a such a basic theme template? I just finished doing all the layout stuff trying to recreate the default values. I still need to go through and see if I missed any settings and also add some comments.
In the end it should be a theme combined with the themes.md.
It makes use of variables, is split into sections for the overall settings (font, font size etc.) and the actual layout (sizes, positions) and is a working single file theme (because all things that would cause a crash are commented out (mostly paths to fonts/images).

[lipebello]

Actually, you can use emulationstation for windows as a theme editor. I think that it would be very hard to adjust the objects dragging them with the mouse cursor and people will end up using text editor anyways.