ActiveState Community

My little annoyance (back/forward buttons) [SOLVED]

Posted by mrdude on 2009-10-03 15:15
OS: All / Any

There are two ways of doing this. Below is the hard way (patch) or read dreftymac's comment on how to do it with a custom toolbar.

The Patch:

After spending some time reading on how to use XUL I figured this out on my own. In the "C:\Program Files\ActiveState Komodo Edit 5\lib\mozilla\chrome" directory is a file called komodo.jar. Unzip it (I used 7-Zip) and go to "content" directory. Open komodo.xul in any text editor (Komodo Edit of course! :D) and move lines 1,567 - 1,592 to a place in the code where you want the buttons to be or just delete them. Save, exit, and zip all the directories into komodo.jar and then replace your current one. Simple as pie! I just thought I'd share this in case there is a newbie like me out there that didn't know XUL (or where to look :)

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ORIGINAL:

Hello everyone, this is my first post, and it's rather petty. Nevertheless it still annoys me to no end. In every editor I've ever used on every planet in the entire universe, the standard toolbar buttons begin with "new", "open", etc... But with Komodo Edit the back/forward buttons are in front, and it irritates the mess out of me. I googled screenshots and every one I saw didn't have those buttons in front. There is no way to customize pre-existing toolbars, and I cannot create a custom toolbar with those standard buttons in it without the back/forward buttons. Maybe I'm just OCD, and maybe I just overlooked an option somewhere, but I can't figure out how to move them. Please forgive my stupidity if this turns out to have an obvious answer.

Thank you.

P.S. This is the only annoyance i have with Komodo Edit. I don't want to sound like I hate it because of this. This is a true kick@$$ piece of software, and also; might this already be a feature in Komodo IDE to customize pre-existing toolbars?

step-by-step instructions
dreftymac | Mon, 2009-10-05 05:17

You asked about how to customize a pre-existing toolbar, but that does not appear to be a readily available option (other than patching the code yourself). Some people may not want to patch the code since that means they will have to patch every time they update komodo versions.

Instead, this explains how to create your *own* custom toolbar. It is a workaround for your original question, but it is pretty straightforward if you want to give it a shot.

  • start komodo
  • open the komodo toolbox (on the right)
  • click on the little "tree" icon and choose "new custom toolbar"
  • wait to be prompted for a toolbox name
  • type in the name: "AnnoyanceBuster"
  • wait for the new toolbar icon to appear in your toolbox
  • right click on the icon and select add :: new macro
  • type in the text of a macro command, give it a name and optional keyboard shortcut
  • repeat the previous step for every command you want to have in your custom toolbar
  • when you are done adding toolbar macros, hide the "standard" toolbar and replace it with your AnnoyanceBuster toolbar

Note: if you do not know how to write custom macros, you can turn on macro recording
and then try an action in Komodo. After that you can save the macro to the toolbox
and paste in whatever code got auto-generated by the macro recorder. If Komodo is not able to record your desired action into a macro, search on komodo documentation or activestate to see if you can find a macro that does what you want to do. If that fails you can ask for help with writing macros on this forum.

Note: Customizing a pre-existing toolbar may be possible also, if so someone will probably come along and explain that also. There are also addons and plugins for Komodo, one of them may do what you want.

HTH

Thanks
mrdude | Mon, 2009-10-05 10:59

Hello, and thank you for your help. I was certainly not looking forward to patching the komodo.xul file every update. The problem I had before with making my custom toolbar to replace the standard one was that I was not familiar with macros (they're great btw). Now I'm becoming more acquainted with them, and I will take your approach. Thanks!