Photoshop toolbar

[Steve B]

Paint Tool Sai-

Ok, so this one is a much simpler setup than Artrage, but I really like it. I wish more stuff was tool enabled, but that's just the way it goes I guess. The setup does most stuff really well. Love the Lasso tool in this one too, and having it return to the Pen works well for me in Sai, because I I use the Lasso/Transform tool most when I'm doing line work, which I use the Pen for. Very natural work flow.

Full Screen is finally working great, so that is really big news to me. Not a single instance of the AHK toolbar being hidden, and once I used the focus button, the Windows toolbar remained hidden too. So that's very cool, and very nice when painting and drawing on a relatively small screen!

All the tool buttons work well. I was wondering though, as in the first post above, if there was a way to highlight the active tool, so that I can know which one is currently in usage. That would be useful. I'm also pondering if one more row of buttons for tools would be best.

Oh, and I totally agree about the right-click stuff. It should only be done if it actually makes sense, where you would almost do it without really thinking about it in the first place. Like "Hey, I should be able to do X with that button somehow" and then you right-clicked it and it happened to be what it actually did. So, it should only be related functions-- either they use the same tool in some other way (like the idea of some sort of menu for a tool that would open, or the resets for Zoom and Rotate), or they are something always used in sequence (like the Lasso and Transform tools).

1) Roll Up/Hide- As with Artrage, the "Up" arrow activates the program that is in the Active Program Icon. I'm not sure if this is intentional or not, but I think it makes more sense to have the arrow be only for "rolling up" the AHK toolbar, and that you would need to enter the Menu and scroll down to move to the another program (if its window is open).

2) Undo/Redo- I agree that the Undo/Redo button is too fast. It needs to be made slower. Right now, sometimes a single tap will be the equivalent of 2-3 undo's, so it's not really controllable. If slowing it down meant we needed to slow down the Undo's/Redo's in Artrage too a bit, that would be a compromise I'd be okay with.

3) Straight Line- I'm having similar problems with the Straight Line button in Sai, as in Artrage. Sometimes, it seems to get things backwards in terms of highlighting. Not all the time, just sometimes. ?? At first, I tap it and nothing happens, but maybe its highlighted? Then I tap it again, its not highlighted, but is working, blah blah. That kind of stuff. Rather frustrating.

4) Navigator- Does this have a special command to show and hide it? Or did I somehow need to do something to hide and unhide it in the misc file? Right now, I'm not getting a response when I push it. I have altered the misc file though so that the Navigator window is up in general, so that's awesome, but I forget now what we were going to use the icon for. LOL!

5) Tab/Fullscreen- Tab is very smooth. I'm having issues with Full Screen though, when using my pen to press it. It kinda goes bonkers, and switches around a bunch. I was wondering if this is because it's somehow reading more than one input when I right-click it? Like it's too fast or something....??? I can't really get it to reliable implement it, and particularly so if I want to do it in stepped measures.
edit- I did more testing on this, and after rebooting, etc. this time it seemed to work fine, so who knows? Perhaps its fine, but I left the comments in case there might be something there anyways.

6) Zoom/Rotate Reset in Navigator- When I have AHK open, it seems to be breaking these commands. I can zoom and rotate with the slider, but I can't reset them with the little reset buttons. Close AHK, and all the commands of the Navigator work right. Strange. It would be nice to have these 2 simple functions work better though.
edit- same here as the other edit. Rebooted, and all seemed to be fine. So perhaps its not an issue with AHK?

7) Focus- I understand the purpose of this now. I normally don't care for Windows Autohide, but was doing it because I thought I had to, to get Sai's Fullscreen to work. If I can use the Focus option in Sai instead, that's great. One small bug- if I right-click the "Move" button up top, while the Focus button is tapped (in order to view the time, battery, etc.), the Windows taskbar flashes back up for the duration the little "time" window is open. Once closed, it goes away.

I do wonder, though, if the Focus button and the Time/Battery, etc. info would be best just to have in the little AHK pull down menu. Focus is the kind of thing you'd set up once at the beginning of a drawing session and not really change for quite a while. So that makes sense, to me, to have in the menu, instead of taking up screen space. And if I could tap the "Active Program" icon and see, right off, the battery/time/charge percentage info in the pull down menu (instead of having to tap an additional button to get that info), then that would also be just as fast as the right-click on the Move button, and might be easier to code (??). I know that might be a rather big if.

Just some thoughts.

This is really coming along, and is very usable right now. I'm excited to see the bugs worked out, for some additional secondary functions to be added as I ponder Sai-usage more, and for, perhaps, in time, the super-smooth user interface and alterability to come into play. It's amazing to see how much you've created in only a few weeks. Working in Sai and Artrage is much much easier. It's also amazing that one can get through 11 pages of posts with only 3 people in a thread in about 3 weeks as well! I'll post a few pics sometime this weekend, just to show you what I'm doing, now that I've got this awesome tool set up to work with.

[lblb]

My work computer tried very hard to die on me yesterday. Fortunately, I won the fight. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to work as much as I wanted on the toolbar. This also means that while I am able to describe below some of the changes I did make, I can't upload the new file right now.

Most of what you mention sounds like minor bugs that I should be able to figure out. There are still some important issues that need to be solved. For example, Sai was successful in sending the toolbar to the background right before I started writing this post, and then it was difficult to bring it back; so I added a hotkey that can be used to bring it back on top (that maybe you could launch with StrokeIt?), we'll see how that works out.

Nevertheless, I'm happy that you find the toolbar useful for now. I have to admit that this ended up being way cooler and functional (and hopefully useful for you and others) than I ever imagined when I started this thread! Importantly for me, I have learned a whole lot about AutoHotkey. I really appreciate all the challenges that you've been throwing this way! Although I would be even more happy if you could indeed share some of what you have been working on!

I started to address some of the issues you identified and found out other bugs that need to be taken care of.
And now a potpourri of answers and comments:
- Before you mentioned it, the Tab/F11 button for Sai was working beautifully for me but now I can't get it to function properly... yeah, very weird and really annoying that it has problems sending only one right-click command... more on this later.
- The idea with the Navigator was to toggle it on/off with Ctrl+B. That works fine for me (but for that you need PopupPanels=0 and PopupNavigator=1 in the misc.ini file).
- Ultimately, I think the idea will be that the "focus down" state will be the permanent state so that the toolbar by default will never steal the focus. For now, it is still a toggle button (that I think I can easily put in the menu) not because the focus button breaks the move button (I think I can fix that somewhat easily when I decide to do so) but because having the toolbar focusable currently helps with keeping it on top.
- I've worked on the straight line button and I think it should be more robust now.
- I fixed the rollup/activation thing. Indeed, that was undesired and undesirable.
- I really like the idea of tool-specific menus... I'm pondering this idea... could a useful extension of that be something like having buttons at the top of the toolbar that essentially reproduce parts of the art program's different menus... for example, have a button that reproduces the list of tools that is available in the Tools -> Select Tool menu in Art Rage...
- I think you are right that a priority should be to highlight the active tool/button, it would really help keeping things straight. I'll see what I can do.
- I think we'll need to try the different options with the lasso and see what feels better for your needs. It somehow isn't flowing as fluidly as it should in ArtRage...
- If you want to change the transparency, change the last number on line 21: it is now set to 150, and you can change it from 0-255.
- The undo/redo delay is independent for the different programs. I'll test it more but it seems like 100ms is better for Sai. If you want to test, change 70 to whatever delay you want (in milliseconds) on lines 823 and 900.
- I can't reproduce the problem you had with the reset zoom/rotate on the Navigator so hopefully it was just a one off.
- About the flickering: I'll have to think about how to make this better... The flickering is actually easy to explain: in order for the toolbar to always stay on top (especially because of Sai), I set the toolbar to constantly check if it's still on top (right now it's set to check every 10ms (completely unnecessary!)) and bring it back on top if it isn't. Hence the flickering. In fact, in Sai it just "looks like" the toolbar stays on top when you toggle full screen: in reality, Sai is often successful in sending the toolbar to the background but the script just brings it back immediately...

Here is something ridiculous I thought of... it's not a very mature idea but maybe you can think of a way to make it better if it is of interest... I was thinking of the unfortunate lack of a color picker in Sai full screen. Could it be conceivable (I don't really know what's possible in Sai...) to have something like a button that pastes an image or opens a custom layer (or something like that) that is an image of a color palette? Then you could use the eyedropper to select a color on this bogus color palette, then send a undo to remove the image/layer/whatever... Does that make any sense?

Indeed 11 pages of posts in three weeks by three users! But as I mentioned before, I really like that it has stimulated many discussions about how to best use the different programs. My main interrogation is really more like: how the hell is it possible that this kind of stuff doesn't seem to have been addressed conclusively before? There has to be artists with real programming chops that thought about doing this more efficiently than we are... And to repeat what has been said many times over: how can it be that the software developers, if they actually use their product, are not developing things like this? Anyway, I'm sure this is much more of a longstanding frustration/interrogation for you guys than it is for me...

Don't hesitate to write more comments and reports bugs or even put out a new mockup with additional buttons. Now that I've figured out most of the main framework for the toolbar, it's actually rather easy to add buttons on there.

[lblb]

Below is a quick fix version to fix some of the most obvious bugs.

- I think the clock/power right-click in full screen is fixed (you will need to replace the file named Clock_Power.ahk in the png subfolder with the file of the same name from the zip file below). As a reminder, to close the clock/power window, you don't have to click OK: a left- or right-click on anything on the screen will close the window.
- I think the straight line button should work better at least in ArtRage (haven't had time to fully address it in Sai). Does it?
- Layer texture: don't forget to set the shortcut to Ctrl+Shift+Alt+X
- Navigator: shortcut is Ctrl+B
- Undo/redo delay set to 100ms in Sai. That works much better for me. Is it ok for you?
- There was an error in the code where hitting on the straight line or the save button in Sai actually sent a "Save As" to Art Rage. That is now fixed.
- I don't have time to try to fix the combo Tab/F11 button right now so I just added a normal F11 button to allow you to use the toolbar for the moment.
- The rollup/activation should be fixed. Note that I really haven't worked on the rollup routines so they may behave non ideally or even weirdly.

I am happy to report that the stay-on-top feature seems to be more reliable than I was describing earlier. After a lot of troubleshooting, I found out that my main problem was because I had some interference from another AHK script that I always run in the background. And that shouldn't happen anymore. Since I fixed this issue, Sai has been much less successful in sending the toolbar to the background. It's still not perfect, but hopefully it will be workable for now. If it does, pressing F7 (maybe you can bind that to a StrokeIt gesture if you see that there are still problems with the stay-on-top feature) could be helpful: that will call the toolbar back on top (but that's not enough!) and also send Sai in the background; after that, pressing any button on the toolbar will reactivate Sai. Although this is a very imperfect solution, it has been ok for me so far.

[Steve B]

There are definitely still a few glitches that are the same, or similar to before, unfortunately. Sorry.

Straight Line button works better, so things go in the right order, but I noticed an additional glitch-- if I do a line, but make a mistake, and hit undo, the Straight Line tool remains highlighted but is no longer active. I have hit it to un-highlight it, which is fine because its not actually changing its status, and then I hit it again to re-highlight it and re-activate it. So, at the least, its not switching the relationship up between highlighting and active status anymore. I'm not sure what's supposed to happen if I hit undo while the Straight Line button is highlighted, but it would make the most sense if I could undo a mistake and then go right back to making straight lines, without having to un-highlight this to tap that to re-highlight this, etc.

I am still having some issues with the Navigator, and the reset buttons sometimes not working for the Rotate and Zoom functions. The Navigator itself works fine, and the sliders work fine too, but sometimes I'm having issues with the reset buttons. I'll try and weasel out what is causing it-- perhaps something to do with the Focus or F11 buttons perhaps....

I am having a funny thing with program selection process in the menu. Perhaps only for Sai. If I drop down the menu and select Sai while in Firefox, for example, it changes the AHK setup to Sai, and pulls up the Navigator, but doesn't switch me to the program sometimes. I then do it again, and it switches me to the program. It doesn't happen every time, but it's frequent enough that I thought I'd mention it. Easily the majority of the time.

F11, sadly, is an evil key. It's causing all sorts of problems. If I tap it once, it seems to work fine. The Windows Taskbar goes away, and only the pull-down Sai menus are left. Tap it again, and Sai supersedes the AHK toolbar, which becomes hidden.

The clock is also not really working as well. If I tap it with a mouse button, everything is fine, but if I right-click the Move button with the pen, I'm starting many multiple instances of the script. Probably 5-10 boxes appear all at once, and then I have to close them all.

I also have to say that I'm not using the Navigator button like I thought I would. If I'm going to change the misc file and have it there, I'd just as well have it there. I use it all the time. If the f11 is causing you fits, I'd be happier with a fully functioning F11 button that took the place of the Navigator button. Just a thought, if that helps in any way.

Sorry I seem to only have negative reports this time.

[lblb]

That's cool, no worries! I'm sure that more than once we'll have to take a step back in order to move forward...

Below is v 1.4. The only thing I changed is the code for the additional F11 button: I think I just messed it up in v. 1.3. Is it behaving less devilishly now?

Fortunately, most of what you mention (except maybe for the Navigator buttons not working properly... I'll have to think about this one) seems like it can be fixed by just modifying the code a bit. For example:
- I hadn't really thought about the straight line/undo sequence but it obviously makes sense that it should work the way you say.
- The menu bug seems like it's just a matter of finding the error in the code.
- That the right-click clock function behaves as wrongly as the right-click F11 seems to be related and that may be good news after all! It may be a good news because it points to a few possible causes that I hadn't thought of with having only the F11 right-click work awkwardly.

Don't worry if you only have bugs to report, it's actually very constructive: that's how we'll get this thing straightened out and optimized!

[lblb]

Below is v1.5:

- Focus button is now in the menu
- All the rollup/down buttons on the ArtRage panel have been activated
- The undo/redo functions should now work when straight line is on in Sai (I think it already worked in Art Rage, right?)
- I think I know what the problem was with the reset buttons on the Navigator. Do you still have this problem?
- I removed the navigator button and replaced it with F11. Indeed, yesterday in v1.3 I really messed up the code for the F11 button.
- I have worked even more to make the stay-on-top feature better
- I haven't worked yet on the weird results when you right-click to get the clock and when you right-click on tab to get F11. More on this later.

[Steve B]

Ooooooooohhhh! Pretty! Hey, there's some pretty cool improvements in this one! It's really strange what a day can do.

Ok, Artrage first, as it's clearly the more developed, and is getting closer and closer to just that "fine tuning" stage.

The newly functional roll-ups in Artrage are working wonderfully. Very smooth and space efficient. A nice touch. A minor aesthetic quibble? When you roll up the whole thing, if you've got the Tools sub-bar out the upper half of the Pencil tool is left on screen, and not rolled up.

Straight Line works fine in general, though I did get it to start working backwards again at some point. However, the ability to Undo and still stay with Control pressed works great. That's a nice little detail. However, I did get some other odd stuff, where, if I accidentally pushed other buttons while the Straight Line was still pressed (because it got all backwards in terms of highlighting) it was then doing some certain Ctrl based key combos, which was odd. Of course, that would probably go away, or just be a user-malfunction, if the highlighting stopped getting all mixed up.

edit--
Re: Undo-- I like how you've changed the input rate for this in Sai. The truth is that I'm getting similar problems in Artrage, where a single hit on the Undo button is giving me multiple instances of erasure. I'd just as well alter the rate to 100 ms, like in Sai. That seems a controllable time set-- I can tap once if I want only one Undo, or easily hold it down and get a stream of them. BTW, a nice side bonus of this AHK Undo button so far? There's a limit to the number of them available in Artage, but this setup seems to be releasing that handicap. That, or I just havn't run into its limit yet.

The Resize button functions very slowly, with only intermittent visual feedback, if I happen to have all the normal panels and menus up while doing so. Comparatively, its super-smooth and responsive when I do it in Full Screen mode. Not sure why there's a difference.

AHK also does a lot of that "repeated flashing" if I'm using/dragging/resizing a menu or pull down, even if its not overlapping AHK. This is a problem most frequently when I'm using menus from the Layer Panel, for example, which opens to the right (and thus "over" the AHK setup). The truth is that I want these native Artrage menus to supersede AHK and go on top with ease, so I can then scroll and pick out stuff without all the funky flashing. The alternative? Simply move my panels farther from the AHK setup, but I thought I might as well ask for what I want. What's new there, eh?

Things that work? Frankly, most of it works really well, despite the length of this post. Rotate and reset work wonderfully, and, as its so easy to use now, I actually find myself using Rotate for the first time ever (after having used Artrage for a year), to get ergonomic angles, which is cool. Color Wheel works great. Flip horizontal and vertical. Resize and Zoom too. All the tools work great too. Clock seems to be working too. Focus in the menu working as well.

The Save button just saves as an Artrage file, which is not so useful to me. I basically always do what Artrage calls "Export Image File" (Ctrl + E) so I can use a non-proprietary file type (.psd, .jpeg, etc). It would be nice to change it to this as the automatic.

Re: the Pencil tool-- I barely use it. This is just a personal preference. I do, however, have a great many pencil and chalk-like Sticker Sprays which I much prefer. The Sticker Spray, btw, is one of the great unexploited elements of Artrage, because it essentially allows you to build (or borrow) custom PS-like brushes from scratch. This is a very useful tool. Anyways, I would love to have the Pencil icon actually defer to the Sticker Spray. I'd just keep the Pencil icon as it is. Likewise, I'd like to have the Lasso tool defer to the Sticker Spray when I'm done with the Transformation input.

I have yet to re-import all my Stencils and Textures (I just recently migrated to 64bit on a new drive), so I haven't really gotten a chance to test out those buttons in a real work flow, but they're pulling up the right menus, so all seems well.

Future thoughts for super-cool improvements at some later date?
a) tools being highlighted when in use, as we discussed
b) A preferences menu of some sort. I know, I know. Slow down, Stevie boy. Still, in the long run, the ability to some how choose what tool Artrage reverts to after using the Lasso, as well as how things are saved, or what painting/drawing tools are included in the Tool subbar would be very cool and very useful. The lack of customization of layout has been a repeated gripe of mine with Artrage, and it would be nice to work that into this currently already pretty amazing setup. Just a thought.

All in all, a vast improvement over the the typical Artrage Fullscreen setup, IMO, as well as some of our earlier efforts in AHK. Very useful on a tablet pc. This is a really sweet setup lblb, and I feel like this Artrage toolbar is nearing a "finished" state. I actually feel pretty privileged to get to use it. I've already seen some work flow changes because of it which is really sort of surprising- I'm using the Flip button now for instance, as well as the Rotate input, and the Lasso/Transform much more than before. I also could see that I'll start to use the Color Samples more as well-- something I'd never really gotten in to. There's a lot of stuff that's just plain easier to get to without having to cross to my left and then clutter the whole screen up with menus.

Here's a piece I was just working on tonight, "The Grumpy Farmer and his Shovel", as I tested everything out. Fun!

[Steve B]

Re: Sai--

This is looking very very good as well. Truthfully, I just tested it out this morning, and I got 0 problems. None.

Straight Line worked well, and I was able to Undo as well while using it. Undo/Redo work better, and I'm not getting double-clicks when I tap the button once. F11 even worked like it was supposed to, and the AHK setup never went under Sai. Lasso and Transform worked fine. Tab worked well, Resize, and all the Tools too, but they've never had problems. Focus seemed to work too. And, as in Artrage, the clock seemed to work well too. Roll-up function seems to be working smoothly as well.

As a basic setup, this is very cool.

Ideas that you've mentioned for further development that I really like?

The idea of a different setup that would include buttons for zoom in/out, rotate/reset, and hand, so I can easily work on this if I don't have the Navigator setup in the misc file. Who knows what kind of work flows one might have in the future?

Your idea of some sort of faux Color Wheel that comes up with the click of a button, and that I could use my right-click (Eye-Dropper) to pick from would be very useful. It occurred to me that it would need to be timed for a release. I wonder if it could be done like in Artrage, in some way, where you tap a button, it pulls up a Color Wheel, and then you right-click your pen to activate the Eye-Dropper, put it to the screen, and slide it around until you get the right color. Otherwise, how would it work? I guess you'd need to tap a button to toggle it on and pull up the Color Wheel, get your color and make sure you somehow have the right color, and then re-tap the button to remove the wheel?

The idea of pulling up some version of the Color Swatches in some way sounds good too, so that I could pick colors, save them, and then pull them up again to pick with the Eye-dropper.

Thirdly, the idea, as well, of some way to easily navigate Layer usage sounds cool to me. I don't need every function, but it would be nice to be able to set up new layers, move them up or down, etc. would be helpful to expedite simple layer functions quickly. Of course, some sort of actual "Layer Panel" interface with more functions available would be super cool, but seems a rather tall order, if its even possible. I like though that, in Artrage, I can pull that up, and only that, with a single key stroke. It's clearly a limitation of Sai's.

I'd never really run into the limitations of Sai's setup until this project, but the fact that I can't call up different panels with a key is frustrating. I wish I could pull up just the Color Picker, or just the Layer Panel, etc. I don't know how to solve that, but that's what's on my mind, and what would make the program easier to use in Full Screen, IMO.

Before this project, I would have said I preferred working in Sai, but now, I'm not so sure. Artrage is now much, much more tablet pc friendly. And it was pretty friendly in the first place. Up until about 2 months ago, Sai had waaaaay better pen and pencil emulation, but around XMas new Sticker Sprays were developed and introduced by a forum member that emulate rougher textured things like charcoal pencil, chalk, wax pencils, etc, and they're very good IMO. Sai still has some textural abilities that are difficult to duplicate in Artrage, but beyond that, I'm not sure. ??

What's been working the best of all in Sai, honeslty, so far, is to have all the menus on the right, to have the Navigator as a popup, but to have it stay in the place it would normally have been in, and then to use Stroke It for many key shortcuts. The benefit? I can pull up Sai's menus and quickly and erogonomically use my right hand to click on things because I can place all the menus on the right side of the screen. With the AHK setups I've used, the problem is that they're always interrupting the Sai interface if I put the Sai menus there, which means all the Sai menus have to stay on the left instead. Clearly, this isn't so erognomic, but I can't seem to figure out a better way to use both.

It'd be nice if I could, at the very least, have all panels be popups, but have the Navigator, and only the Navigator, always being viewable. Then I could press a button to just bring up the other panels as pop-ups, which I could then freely locate where I want them to go. That doesn't seem like an option though. If I make everything a popup, then the Hide button affects ALL pop-ups, including the Navigator. Ugh. Does that make any sense?

I don't know if that's helpful in any way, but I thought explaining the issues I'm having in Sai with the AHK setups might help us make the most functional toolbar. Clearly, the way Artrage is created seemed to lend itself to a pretty sophisticated AHK setup, but I'm not sure if Sai's going to let us do something similar. If so, a pared down, simplified version (like what you've already done), may be the best option.

Ideas?

[lblb]

Alright, I thought I would have more time to work on this but something's come up and I need to go. I'll look more carefully at your previous posts later.

I'm glad the toolbar is useful. It's really when I figured out all the rollups for ArtRage yesterday (not as obvious as I thought it would be!) that I realized that our previous efforts have actually led to something that is pretty cool and usable! Oh and nice grumpy farmer! I'm not an artist and I am completely amazed at what can be done with these programs (even more so now that I am starting to know how they work!)

Below is v. 1.6

- undo/redo set to 100ms in Art Rage
- in ArtRage, left-click on the save button is now Ctrl+e and right-click is Ctrl+s
- in Art Rage, pencil is now sticker sprays (hotkey = s) and so is the tool that it toggles to after the lasso sequence
- trying something in Sai: the eraser button is not the eraser anymore and it sends Alt+L to call up the Layer top menu. Could something like this be useful? Could have a button for each menu? It works well even in full fullscreen mode (better when the Focus button has been triggered). With my EP121, it actually works well only if I hit the eraser button and keep the pen close to the screen: this way the Layer menu doesn't disappear. If I hit the eraser button but pull my pen a bit too far from the screen, the Layer menu disappears.
- if you want the eraser back, change "send !l" on line 1346 for "send {e}"
- let's try something: as I mentioned before, the constant flickering is because the toolbar is constantly verifying and bringing itself back on top, but maybe that is not necessary anymore since I made many changes. You can turn this function off by putting a semicolon ; before "settimer" at the beginning of line 16. If you do this, the flickering should be gone. Does that solve some of the issues you've been having with some menus (and maybe resize in AR) and other windows? But does the toolbar still stay on top (in both Art Rage and Sai) or is it now more often sent to the background?

- for the straight line in AR and Sai: now that I know how to do what I did for the undo button in Sai (wow! great sentence!), I realize that in order for the straight line toggle to work well (i.e. so that the toggle and image don't get messed up) we may have to make adjustments. The toggle gets messed up if straight line is on and you hit a button that uses the same key (shift for Sai, ctrl for Art Rage) in its code. So I can see that for each button other than the straight line, I could individually assign one of two functions: either the button ignores the straight line (like undo/redo now do) or the button can be set to release the straight line function (and toggle its icon back to straight line off) before it sends its own command. All of this should actually be pretty straightforward. I'm guessing most buttons will have the latter function. Is that something you want to be programmed in there?

[Steve B]

This is all very good news so far! What a productive day on this front.

Undo/Redo in Artrage is much better now, same for Save allowing both options, and the Sticker Spray being the replacement for the pencil works great in my work flow, as well as the default for after Transformations are done. I actually already forgot how cumbersome that can be in the normal UI. I went to show my better half how it normally worked before the AHK UI, and was generally annoyed by the experience!

Eraser mod in Sai isn't working for me. It's not pulling up the Layers menu, and it's also not working as the Eraser button either. I just tried using Alt+ L though. I'm not sure what I think of it. I don't think it's going to offer anything that couldn't be just as easily done with a small selection of Layer buttons. What I really want is the selection of Layer toggles and such that Sai has in its Layers pallette. That's the super useful stuff.

I like the idea of the toggle off feature for the Straight Line, if another button is pressed. That works best for me, and is what I would presume it would have done.

However, probably the coolest news to me is that your recommendation for adding the semi-colon to remove the "stuttering" and blinking has worked wonderfully. It has not fixed the non-responsiveness of the tool circle when resizing while the menus are up, but that's pretty small beans to me. And the truth is it actually is resizing the tool fluidly (you can see so in the percentages box in the bottom left corner), but it just doesn't seem to be getting reflected smoothly in the little size "circle" if the menus are open. But who cares, since the rest of this issue has been solved so well now?

I thought I was being finicky about it, but when I showed my wife the setup in general, she noted, on her own, the repeated blinking. It did it quite a lot, and it's not doing it at all now. Not even while under the Windows Taskbar, nor while moving panels in Artrage, or even while Artrage has a panel that open over the top of the AHK setup, etc. It's very nice on the eyes now. It seems a small thing, but it actually has real value.

Currently, it's staying on top in Artage all of the time. It seems to be staying on top in Sai if I use the Focus toggle. F'ing heavenly.

Seems like pretty much everything on the list is answered or is going to be. That pretty much only leaves the sorta "optional" cool stuff to explore more of for Artrage. Great news.