Idea for very useful features (Simple yet effective)

[dimapoter]

Hi, I am a registered user of Aero Glass. I use this for Windows 8.1.

I would like to share an idea I had for Aero Glass: Integrating Aero Glass parameters into theme system. Here's all you would need:

1) Windows variable expansion
We need Aero Glass to support expansion of environment variables. Maybe some whitelist or sanitization would be required.
I.e. Aero Glass doesn't like it when I set CustomThemeAtlas to %ResourceDir%\Atlas\whatever.png.
I must instead always write the full path as follows: C:\Windows\Resources\Atlas\whatever.png

2) Registry keys that Aero Glass uses read from the msstyles file or a corresponding file (the real magic!)
Any msstyles for 8.1+ which is made with Aero Glass in mind usually ships with a .reg file. It would be great if Aero Glass were updated with one feature. There are two possible routes I can think of going:
Reading Aero Glass config keys from the theme file. I.e.

[AeroGlassStyles]
CustomThemeAtlas=Something
TextGlowMode=Something

However, this might present one issue which I can think of: Windows might sanitize the .theme file in some cases. I recall setting aerolite.msstyles and coming back to aerolite.msstyles.msstyles.

If this will truly prove to be an issue, we check which msstyles file is defined in the theme and look for an existing .aeroglass file or something inside the same directory. I came up with this idea originally and considered executing some assumed .reg file, but that's a bit more dangerous. A non-registry file in some custom format specifically for Aero Glass would probably be a better bet.


Let me know what you think. Aero Glass is already very handy, but I feel like this would make it way better.
-Dmitri


Edit:
As for users who wish not to have their Aero Glass reg settings tampered with by .theme or .msstyles, you can simply add a DWORD in the usual place called DisallowThemeConfig or something. By default, it would be 0, but users who prefer to have their existing settings preserved can always add this registry key and set it to 1. This will not be an issue at all since the user who had custom Aero Glass preferences uses regedit, regardless.

Edited January 18, 2020 by dimapoter