How to customise your Tools palette

[Touched]

As requested, here's a little tutorial on customising your Tools palette, for anyone who may not be aware of this ability. I think it would be easiest to explain how to do it by explaining how I figured it out. When I first got Anime Studio in late December, there were a few keyboard shortcuts I wanted to change to make it more helpful to the way I'm used to working, and I learned from Ramón López here that you can change the shortcut letters for items on the Tools palette in the _tool_list.txt file in the Scripts folder.

Well, later, when I started installing some of the custom scripts available here, the ones that were made to work in the Tools palette showed up in an "Other" group at the bottom, as others here have also experienced.

Some time later, I had made a modification to the code of one of the tools, and had backed up the original tool script by renaming it. Afterward, I noticed that there was an extra tool in my palette with no icon. Hovering over it showed it to be the renamed tool, and this gave me a little more insight into how AS handles the Tools palette.

I think it was Vern who mentioned once that he had "replaced" the original Lost Marble tools with Fazek's modified versions, and I didn't know if that meant that he had renamed Fazek's tools to the corresponding names of the original tools and deleted the originals, or if he used the method I'll describe here: I experimented in the _tool_list.txt file by changing the entries in the original sections (Draw, Fill, and Bone) to refer to Fazek's tools instead of the originals. When I did this, Fazek's tools were at the top, and the original tools were now relegated to the "Other" group. So from there I made new entries throughout the file wherever I decided the other new scripts belonged, and moved the originals out of the folder entirely, so there was no longer any "Other" group. Tools only appear in the "Other" group if they're not explicitly placed somewhere in the _tool_list.txt file.

Finally, there were a couple of tools that didn't really fit in any of the existing groups, and so I tried another little experiment, duplicating a section of code from the _tool_list.txt file that delineated a group, and named it "Keyframes". Voilà, a new group appeared in the palette, and that's where I put the 4 keyframe-based tools you can see in my sample image.

So that's how to organise and clean up your palette, and if any of it was unclear, here's a link to my _tool_list.txt file for you to look through.

[Genete]

One thing that confused me when look inside the tool_list.txt was the dots (...)
I suppuose that it means that there is no keyboard shortcut for that tool.
Thanks for the "How to" Touched.

Best
Genete

[Patrick McClintock]

This is a great tip. I haven't tried re-naming groups, but I suppose it's that easy. coooooool........

[heyvern]

I think it was Vern who mentioned once that he had "replaced" the original Lost Marble tools with Fazek's modified versions

No I didn't rename. I "replaced" them... I replaced them in spirit only. I use the same technique you describe of changing the _tools text file in the tool script folder.

I actually need to keep some of the original tools around. One of the problems with custom tools is that there are only a limited number of modifier keys (ctr, opt, shift) which means there aren't enough to do everything you need with one tool. Shift constrain movement of points for instance. I keep the LM tool for that just to do shift constraint movement.

A heads up for new users who add in some of Fazek's tools. I have a big problem with the point translate and rotate tools. Fazek has added dual functionality to them. The same tool works for points and bones.

Unfortunately this causes some odd behavior and I still like the dedicated bone tools but you can't select them using the key commands (T and R) because it defaults to the point select tool.

To fix this without changing the code in Fazek's tools (I will probably do this some day) I added new key commands for the bone tools;

"Y" for the bone translate tool
"J" for the bone rotate tool

These were I think the only 2 keys left... there may be a few more. This has worked well. I still use the wrong tool occasionally.

-vern