BindControl - Keybinds and Popmenus Editor and Manager

[emersonrp]

3 minutes ago, kenlon said:

I ended up binding ESC to "/wdw_load" (after saving the window layout I want to use to Homecoming/settings/live/wdw.txt with /wdw_save) since I use the same layout for all characters. I used a custom bind, since your wdw save/load option uses wdwsavefile/wdwloadfile and I don't need separate window layouts at the moment. Just FYI.

 

Oh yeah I can make PowerBinder know about wdwsave and wdwload, for sure.  Not sure why I didn't in the first place, probably UI laziness.

 

3 minutes ago, kenlon said:

Another thing, the "default profile" being just a regular profile that you then use when creating new profiles has some drawbacks. If I add a new bind (custom or otherwise) to my default, or change one of my custom binds, I have to either recreate all my character-specific profiles or make the change to all of them myself. 
What I would really want, as an end user, is the following:

 

(*snipped description)

 

I see where you're going with that, and I wonder whether it wants to be a separate notion from the Default Profile.  I have certainly ever thought about the fact that BC saves the -entire- Profile every time, even the values of controls you haven't populated etc etc.  That's a deliberate decision, at least so far, so that if, say, you configure a bunch of speed-on-demand settings, and then turn off the "Enable SoD" checkbox and save, it doesn't get rid of all your historical setup.  It is a little heavy-handed, though.

 

3 minutes ago, kenlon said:

From looking over the code, that would be a bit of a pain to implement (at the very least), but I figured I'd at least mention it, given that you're already mucking around in the "which powers does this profile actually have" bits of Bindcontrol. The simplest way to do it, seems to me (though it may not be the best), would be to change up the file format so that each bind entry has an additional field that marks whether the bind is profile-specific or not. If the bind is from the default, not profile specific, then when opening the profile BindControl will update those binds to whatever the default has been changed to.

 

It would be a pain, but I'm intrigued enough to mull it pretty seriously.  It's certainly within the realm of possibility to mark each bind as "explicitly set" versus "part of a default profile" or the like.  Again, I'm thinking that this might be a separate notion from Default, though.  Base Profile?  I guess I'm wanting not to make things stop working as expected on the one hand, but I see your pain in updating many profiles when you want to make the same change in each one.  Hmm.  I'm going to think about this a bit more.

 

[kenlon]

Yeah, doesn't matter what you call the "default". I named my default profile to "base binds" which seemed appropriate to me, since all the other profiles are build on them.

[emersonrp]

5 minutes ago, kenlon said:

Yeah, doesn't matter what you call the "default". I named my default profile to "base binds" which seemed appropriate to me, since all the other profiles are build on them.

I mean, I'm wondering about more than a naming thing -- like, whether there wants to be a functionality for "merge these changes with a base profile" that's separate from "set defaults for new profiles" which still seems like a desirable thing.  The notion of Profiles in general was originally that they might be more modular like that, but it's never actually worked that way in practice, apart from the notion of "Load a different profile's binds" which is squirreled away somewhere in PowerBinder, and that's not really what we're talking about, at all.

 

I could imagine a scheme where there's a separate entity from a full Profile that you can load/import that would just splat on top of whatever's loaded .  Then you'd load up your Base thing and apply your various overload/merges and save each one.  That isn't as elegant as the business you're talking about, I think, where a profile is auto-updated when its base is?  Still trying to get my head around how that might work mechanically and UI-wise, but it's a fascinating exercise.

[kenlon]

Yeah, my assumption was it would be separate, I was just using the name. Which I probably should have clarified. Maybe make "Edit defaults" one of the available buttons at startup and go from there? 

 

[emersonrp]

49 minutes ago, kenlon said:

Yeah, my assumption was it would be separate, I was just using the name. Which I probably should have clarified. Maybe make "Edit defaults" one of the available buttons at startup and go from there? 

 

That's an interesting first step.  There's currently no actual way to edit the Default Profile, as I'm sure you've noticed in all this, apart from make a new profile, make changes, and resave as default.  Longish ago, the Default Profile was actually a "Default.bcp" file that was treated specially based on the name, but people kept accidentally loading it and tinkering with it when what they were after was making a new profile.  The whole flow is better than it was but not perfect or great yet.  Having a special "working with the default profile" mode sounds a little fiddly to try to create, but is probably a good idea.  Would have to do things like disable the normal "save" and "write binds" and so forth.... Hmm.