Skin Configuration - flyinghyrax/Elementary GitHub Wiki

Usually, if a skin option is a kind of toggle - switching between two options, or picking between a small set of options - you can change that setting by right-clicking on the skin and looking under "Custom skin actions". Examples include changing the clocks between 12 and 24-hour time, changing the weather skin between English and Metric Units, or selecting the media player to use with the NowPlaying plugin.

Options that require text entry (e.g. file paths, dimensions, or drive letters) are changed by editing the variables in the skin files themselves. The options are Rainmeter variables that appear in the skin file as Key=Value pairs. Editable settings will be near the top of the file, and are surrounded by large "Settings >>" and "<< Settings" indicators. To change one of these options:

1. Find the key you are looking for,
2. Edit the part after the "=" sign to the value you want,
3. Save the file, and
4. Refresh the skin to apply the change.

Available options for each skin are documented below, divided by skin. (But of course this is Rainmeter, so you can edit anything you want if you have the time!) If you're looking for settings that will change the appearance of all the skins in the suite, check out the Appearance Settings page.

Jump to a skin on this page:

• Chronophage
• Media Player
• Notes
• Web search
• System monitors
• Clocks
• Weather

By default, this skin displays the year, month, week, and day of the year. You can change the last digit to display the day of the week instead. To toggle between showing the day of the year and the day of the week, right click on the skin and select "Show day of week" or "Show day of year" under "Custom skin actions".

The media player skins will work with any of the players supported by the NowPlaying plugin included with Rainmeter, as well as Spotify via the third-party Spotify plugin. If you use Spotify, use the skins under /Media/Spotify/. If you use either AIMP, foobar2000, iTunes, J. River Media Center, MediaMonkey, MusicBee, Winamp, or Windows Media Player, use the skins under /Media/NowPlaying/.

If using one of the NowPlaying skins, you can right-click the skin and select the media player of your choice from the context menu under "Custom skin actions". Alternatively, you can change this setting by editing the file /Media/NowPlaying/shared.inc in a text editor and changing the player variable. Valid values are listed on the documentation page for the NowPlaying plugin.

Options for the notepad skin can be changed by editing the skin file. Right-click the skin, select "Edit skin" to open the notepad skin in a text editor, and scroll down to the [Variables] section. You can change the file where the text of the notes is stored, the dimensions of the skin, and the font sizes.

Variable	Description	Default
notesfile	Path to the text file storing the notes that are displayed by the skin. Can be absolute or relative to the folder containing the notes skin; should be surrounded by quotes if the path contains spaces.
width	Width of the notes area	280
height	Height of the notes area	280
notesFontSize	The font size when displaying the notes	13
inputFontSize	Font size when editing the notes	12

The default notes file should save and display any character from the UTF-8 character set correctly. If you use another file to store your notes (e.g., a file in dropbox), the skin will attempt to write a UTF-8 byte-order mark - an invisible set of characters that indicates to programs that the file is UTF-8 encoded text - to the beginning of the file whenever you edit the text using the skin, so unicode characters should still be displayed correctly.

If you're interested in the gritty details of unicode support, have a look at the Unicode in Rainmeter page in the Rainmeter documentation.

To change the search engine used by the search skin, simply right-click the skin and select your search engine of choice from under the "Custom skin actions" section of the context menu. Several search options are built in, including Google, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, Baidu, and Wikipedia.

It is fairly straightforward to edit the skin to use any search provider you'd like, provided the search engine supports entering queries via a URL (most do).

(todo)

By default, the system skins display (from left to right or top to bottom):

• Used CPU %
• Free RAM %
• Free disk %
• Current upload speed
• Current download speed

You can toggle the RAM and disk measurements between used percentage and free percentage using the skin context menu under "Custom skin actions".

The variable to change the hard drive can be found in Elementary\System\shared.inc (it is in a shared file so that both system variants will monitor the same hard drive). Just look for the drive variable in the [Variables] section.

By default, the drive is set to #PROGRAMDRIVE#, so the skins will show disk space from whatever hard drive Rainmeter is installed on. To monitor another drive, just replace that with the capitalized drive letter followed by a colon, like C:. So for example, if I wanted to monitor drive "F", I the whole line in the file would read:

drive=F:

After changing the drive letter, just save the file and refresh the system skin.

The clock skins can display either 12-hour or 24-hour time. You can toggle between the two using the skin context menu. Just right click on the time skin, look under "Custom skin actions", and select either "Change to 24-hour" or "Change to 12-hour".

The weather skin uses Weather.com's WXData feed. It can show weather data from any location you can view on weather.com, and display either English or Metric units.

You can change the displayed units using the skin context menu. Just right-click the weather skin, and select either "Change to English units" or "Change to Metric units" to toggle between the two.

To find your location code, search for your desired location on Weather.com. Once you reach the page that displays the weather information for your location, check the URL bar in your web browser. The URL should look something like the following:

https://weather.com/weather/today/l/USCA0987:1:US

(This example shows the URL for San Francisco, California, US.)

The location code in the URL is the portion between the last / and the next : after the last /; in our example it is USCA0987:

"https://weather.com/weather/today/l/USCA0987:1:US"

Alternatively, you may already be using a skin that uses Weather.com as a data source, such as WXDataWeather or illustroSimpleWeather. If so, you can just use the same location code that you are using for that skin. Additionally, both of those skins include utilities to search for your location code by name.

Once you have your location code,

1. Right-click on the weather skin and select "Edit skin". (This will open the skin file in a plain text editor.)
2. Find the location variable under the [Variables] section
3. Replace the current code after the = sign with your code
4. Save the file
5. Refresh the weather skin

To check the location being used by the weather skin, hover over the word "Currently" in the skin. The tool-tip will show the weather station being used. The observation station that collects your weather data may not be exactly the same as the name of your location, but should be geographically close by.