Default tool on open stack

[Richard Gaskin]

Peter M. Brigham wrote:

 > On Apr 12, 2016, at 8:02 AM, Mark Waddingham wrote:
 >
 >> A potentially better solution (which insulates them entirely from
 >> changing tools!) would be to either send your tools to your
 >> colleagues as plugins (which they put in the My LiveCode/Plugins
 >> folder), or send them to them after setting the 'style' property
 >> of your tool stacks to "modeless". (In the latter case you can set
 >> the style back to "topLevel" to edit).
 >>
 >> In either case, the stacks will load into the IDE permanently in
 >> browse mode.
 >
 > That takes care of Tim's situation, but the general case of
 > defaulting to the pointer tool is still an annoyance. If LC is not
 > already running and I double-click on a stack to open it, then after
 > the IDE loads and then my stack loads I get the pointer tool. Luckily
 > I locloc all my buttons and fields or I'd be moving things around
 > inadvertently until I remember I have to change to browse mode. I
 > would love to be able to change this behavior in LC preferences.

The pointer tool is great for doing layout, but for many layout is not 
where the majority of time is spent in the IDE.  We make an object once, 
and occasionally adjust its properties, but for myself and a good many 
others I know the majority of our time spent in the IDE is scripting, 
and that most often means using the Browse tool.

But rather than wait for LC to consider adding a preference for the 
default tool, I took care of it in my devolution plugin with one line:

    send "choose browse tool" to me in 10 millisecs

I've found even brief timers for boot operations useful because the IDE 
has a very complex load sequence, and a timer helps ensure that 
everything it's doing will settle down before my action is invoked.

There are many other prefs in devolution for tailoring the environment, 
like hiding the Tools palette (for the same reason: I'm not adding 
objects every time I launch the IDE), and even hiding the menu bar 
itself (with devolution I rarely interact with the LC menu bar directly, 
saving good screen space at the top where my projects need it) - feel 
free to borrow any of those boot actions you find useful in your 
projects (though they're easy enough to script it's probably simpler to 
just write them from scratch than to modify devo's more specialized code):
<http://fourthworld.com/products/devolution/index.html>

IMO one of the best things about LC is that its IDE is made entirely in 
LC.  Everything is customizable.

What Bill Appleton once said about SuperCard applies perhaps even more 
to LiveCode:

     HyperCard is a multimedia authoring environment.  SuperCard is
     a tool you can use to make multimedia authoring environments.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
  ____________________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com