Changing the openGL colors in the Axis GUI

tommylight wrote:

@oddwick
Well this tends to happen sometimes in the open source community, take something and make it better and........show the others the finger !

yeah, i have found the open source community to be a bit fickle sometimes. one time i asked if there was a touch screen theme or desktop for debian on an *exchange forum and you would have thought i ordered a baby seal steak at a vegan restaurant... forgive my fingers lack of double click kung fu on a 15" touch screen. sheesh

anyway, granted i am just a hobbyist and love to tinker on my machines, -BUT- other times it is actually nice to be able to work WITH your machine rather than ON it. that was my whole justification back in the day when i left microsoft behind and switched to macs. sometimes when you turn on a machine, you just want (hopefully good) stuff to happen. and when you find the work has already been done for you, well, score!

the other problem is that my time is at a premium (in other words, i have none) and i definitely don't have enough of it to reinvent the wheel let alone a mind blowingly spectacular interface. as a former developer, i am all for being polylingual, but trying to untangle completely undocumented code while untangling the intricacies of tk from scratch has all the thrill and usefulness of learning ancient Aramaic. great for translating biblical scrolls or summoning demons, but not really practical. although, in the nix world, that is probably about one in the same!

loboy wrote:

I appreciate the compliments on the work I did

after seeing your work, i bow and say "we're not worthy"

loboy wrote:

...I do not know the process for submitting changes or making an easy installation procedure. I do not know the ramifications of installing my work on another machine.

Actually, not asking for a full release or fork or anything like that. if you just post your changes, there are some absolutely brilliant minds on here that can hack it into something useful and installable. what you have done at the very least was to untangle axis. you basically created a rosetta stone. every machine has different needs and design goals, so there will be modifications, but starting from a legible script would be quite efficacious. i have seen post after post about something to do with axis and the response has alway been the inevitable "i suppose you can, but its buried somewhere deep in axis and, well good luck with that!" with an implied snicker.

or if you are not comfortable with being canonized for being the man brought divine beauty to a butt ugly interface, then possibly a list of the files that you modified and a brief description of their relationships to each other? i can live off of crumbs. in fact, from what hints you did drop i started poking around on my vm linuxcnc and trying the whole "hey what does this do? oh crap, that was bad!" thing. don't laugh, but that is how i count my successes.

And i have used a .axisrc to make some changes to axis with alot of success. that is a good way to make minor changes, but seems more like a bandaid than a solution. especially in light of @loboy has shown is possible.

dont get me wrong, axis is more than functional and does wonders for me and it is only more recently as i have delved more into the voodoo that is linuxcnc that i actually realized that axis is NOT actually lcnc but decoupled. i have used it for several years now and whether or not it is because its what i am used to, i have not found another gui that i actually like or is as functional right out of the box.

imho, axis's shortcomings are entirely visual, organizational, and a lack of customization/modularity. on my machine right now, i have use pyvcp panels that end up duplicating alot of the other commands such as flood and mist. checkboxes? seriously? outside of some website trying to get permission to spam you, who uses a checkbox? let alone using it to turn on critical machinery. try hitting one of those bad boys in a hurry on a 15" touchscreen...

anyway, on a side note, can someone answer me this? if axis is good enough to be the default gui for lcnc, why has no one done anything to document or clean it up? for at least as long as i have used linuxcnc, it has (at least outwardly anyway) remained unchanged. and especially with all the work that has gone into 2.8 with joints/axis there seems to be alot of backend advancement, but the frontend seems to be a time capsule...

also, before that last paragraph gets taken the wrong way, that is in no way intended to be an insult/commentary on all of the hard work that has been put into this project. i truly from the bottom of my heart appreciate all of the effort that has gone into this, and were it not for you all, those of us less skilled (me) would all end up having to use mach! ouch

tommylight wrote:

I absolutely love the Axis GUI since the day i first laid my eyes on it a long time ago.
It is simple and clean and all the intricate working of Linuxcnc is hidden under it.
It also resizes to fit almost all monitors from the really old ones to new ones ( there is a screenshot of it here in the forum i posted a while back running at 4800x1920 pixels ! ), the preview is big so you can see if anything is wrong with the gcode just by a quick look.

for the most part, i absolutely agree with everything you just said. it was my first introduction to linuxcnc and i have used it ever since. as i become more advanced (read: ambitious) i have played around with alternatives and have yet to find anything that even comes close to it for functionality. and every point you raised is exactly what i LOVE about it. nothing extra, no frills, and usable.

but..... it does NOT work well on small screens and is definitely NOT touch friendly. and visually, i feel like it should be sitting on a pile of windows 3.1 floppies and some shareware disks. am i really that old? well crap. anyway, i just wish that it was a bit easier to poke around under the hood to tweak it. i think its almost there, but just hasn't quite realized its full potential. and frankly i am a bit jealous that somebody (lookin at you @loboy) has shown me a glimpse of what i only wish i had!

tommylight wrote:

I am not able to stress enough how easy it is to teach someone who has never used a machine before. In about 2 days! Try that with any other GUI ....

agreed! that is about how long it took me to figure it out without training, just google. and that is the entirely the reason i want to keep using it. just a few tweaks. bigger buttons and maybe the ability to position things a little differently for vertical monitors.
my machine is in an enclosure with a touch screen monitor off to one side so that it is just under eye level, but i have to have it horizontal because when axis resizes with my pyvcp on one side i end up with three newspaper columns and my dro fills the preview screen. that means the monitor sticks out like dumbos ear!