SporeModderFX: The Editor pane - emd4600/SporeModder-FX GitHub Wiki

The Editor pane is in the center of the program and it takes most of its space. It's where you are going to view and edit files.

Editor tabs

The top of of the editor shows multiple tabs; the editor displays the contents of the current selected tab.

The blue tab is a special one, as it always shows the file that is selected in the Project view. The other tabs can be opened by double clicking files, and will stay there until you close them.

If a tab has the * character, it means it has unsaved changes. You can save changes by pressing Ctrl + S. If you switch tabs or select another file without saving the changes, the program will warn you with a dialog.

Info label

At the bottom of the editor there's a label that shows information about the file: the project it belongs to and its full path (relative to the project).

Status bar

At the bottom of the program there's a thin bar. If your file has any errors, it will become orange to warn you:

The status bar will also warn you if the current file is of an unsupported format that cannot be edited:

The text editor

SporeModder FX provides multiple types of editors: one for text files, another for textures, another for user interfaces,...

Here we will explain the main one, the text editor. Although there's not much to explain: you just write on it. One important thing to know though: the editor will highlight possible errors and warnings. If you hover the mouse over them, a tooltip will appear explaining the error:

Errors are highlighted in red and are critical: if you don't fix them, your mod will not pack. Warnings are highlighted in orange, and are not critical: your mod will still pack. For example, the warning here was just telling us that we have an unused option.

Hovering over other words might also tell us interesting information. For example, in Property Lists (.prop) hovering over a property shows us the description of that property (if there's any):

It is also possible to Ctrl + Left Click some words to do special items. For example, if you do that on a key property it will open the file that it's referencing. If you control click over a color, it will show a color picker.