Theme development using a simulator

[Carson Dyle]

I discovered the various Rockbox simulators and am now using one for my Sansa Fuze v2.  I think it has a bug or two, but overall it's making theming much easier than loading and testing themes on the device itself.

One question, though: Is there a quick way to reload the current theme?  I make changes, test, change, test.  Each time I have to get back to the Main Menu, Settings, Theme Settings, Browse Theme Files, scroll, select.  Then back to the WPS,  And much of the time I break something and end up looking at the default WPS and have to repeat all of the above again.

I read somewhere in either the manual or wiki saying that 'playing' a theme will load it, but I'm not sure what that means, or if it would be any quicker.  A hotkey like Ctrl-R to reload a theme would be ideal.  Does such a thing exist?

[saratoga]

Can't you just quit and relaunch the sim?

[Chronon]

"Playing a theme" means to navigate to its location using the file browser and "launch" it by pressing Select.

[Carson Dyle]

Can't you just quit and relaunch the sim?

Ah, that works for the WPS.  Thanks.  It doesn't reload the theme's cfg, though.  I imagine that's to keep from clobbering user selected customizations of things like font, scroll bar position, etc.

[karltpb]

Navigate to .rockbox/themes/ and "play" the desired cfg file. Press play button equivalent to go to WPS. Make necessary changes to your theme. Press select button equivalent to switch to the last visited directory (which would be .rockbox/themes/ in this case) and "play" the cfg file associated with the theme.

[Carson Dyle]

Nice.  Just three key presses to reload the theme and get back to the WPS.  Thanks.

[karltpb]

A handy trick I've been using for a while now.  

[Carson Dyle]

Is there any way to reload tagnavi.config and tagnavi_custom.config, or does it require a restart?

[bluebrother]

For developing themes you can also use the ThemeEditor which was developed about half a year ago as part of Googles Summer of Code. It might be missing a few tags that have been added / changed since then, but from my understanding this shouldn't make it unusable.

[Llorean]

As a note neither tagnavi.config nor tagnavi_custom.config are considered theme files and shouldn't be included as part of a theme.

[Carson Dyle]

No, no, I realize that... it was more of a related question given the discussion above.