vsch/plugindeveloperstoolbox

Collection of useful extensions for plugin developers

Plugin Developer's Toolbox

A collection of useful functions for plugin developers. I use it in the development of the idea-multimarkdown plugin.

Adobe PhotoShop, Illustrator and now discontinued Slicy post processor, generate @2x resolution files suffixed with _dark as _dark@2x suffixed, while the IDE expects @2x_dark suffix for dark, high resolution files.

This plugin detects when such files are created and changes their name to what the IDE expects.

It also handles Slicy quirk of using groups to create sub-directories to allow some groups to be converted to concatenation of file name, reducing the amount of group renaming when copying icons in PhotoShop.

Version 1.2 adds option to remove plugin id from plugin.xml editor tab title to reduce the editor tab real-estate used. The IDE always adds plugin id to the editor tab, which makes sense for projects which contain multiple plugin.xml files. On a single plugin project makes such tab title expansion a waste of valuable editor tab space.

Version Notes

Version 1.2 Release

• Add: Disable Editor Tab Title Expansion for plugin.xml files to remove the plugin id from editor tab of plugin.xml files.
• Add: Only when single plugin.xml is open to allow expansion of title when more than one plugin.xml file is open

Version 1.1 Release

⚠️ The plugin now has a project setting to enable its operation under settings (Preferences) > Tools > Plugin Developer's Toolbox. It is disabled by default not to interfere with projects that do not need its functionality.

Version 1.0 Initial Release

For now it is just one extremely useful function if you use Slicy for extracting icon images from PSD files.

Slicy File Post-Processor

Slicy from macrabbit extracts individual icons from PSD files containing layer groups with specific names. It will also create @1x icons from @2x icons for file names that end in @2x.ext and will put extracted icons in subdirectories if the parent layer group ends in /.

Why bother? If you maintain a plugin, then you will need to create 4x icons for every icon used in the IDEA: @1x light, @1x dark, @2x light, @2x dark. Each with a proper naming convention, so the IDEA recognizes them as retina and scheme type.

Slicy is an awesome tool that will let you create a single PSD file with multiple icon images and monitor the file to automatically export the icons when the file changes. It will also generate @1x images from @2x images if a @1x image was not provided in the file. This cuts the number of images to maintain in half.

The plugin augments this in the following way:

1. The slicy naming convention does not match IDEA for darcula @2x icons. So the plugin will rename any newly created image files matching [email protected] to fileName@2x_dark.ext, where ext is .png, .jpg, .jpeg or .gif.

2. For each icon you need to create 2 layer groups: [email protected] and [email protected]. This may not seem like much but when you add a new icon you need to copy and rename 2 layer groups, and make sure you match the naming convention for each layer. This plugin will let you just create a template of layer groups to be reused for each icon:

   iconName.+/ [email protected] icon layers go here [email protected] icon layers go here

   To create a new icon, you only have to duplicate the iconName.+/ group and rename it to newIconName.+/ group. When you save the file Slicy will do its thing and create the following files, in whatever directory you originally told it to save the icons:

    directory/
        iconName.+/
            [email protected]
            +.png
            [email protected]
            _dark.png
        newIconName.+/
            [email protected]
            +.png
            [email protected]
            _dark.png
   

   Now the plugin will come into action and transpose the above into what the IDEA will recognize as a set of 2 icons with normal, retina, default and darcula scheme variations:

    directory/
        [email protected]
        iconName.png
        iconName@2x_dark.png
        iconName_dark.png
        [email protected]
        newIconName.png
        newIconName@2x_dark.png
        newIconName_dark.png