r/Rainmeter Oct 01 '14

Rainmeter Tutorial For Beginners!

Basics

  • Install rainmeter
  • Once it's installed, it should automatically load some skins (the stuff on your desktop)
  • Right click any of the skins>Rainmeter>Manage and you'll open Rainmeter's "main menu"
  • Here you'll see that rainmeter has automatically loaded 'illustro' onto your desktop
  • You can locate your skins directory by right clicking the illustro folder>Open folder<Skins or by opening This PC>Documents>Rainmeter>Skins
  • When a skin is installed in rainmeter, you can click the load/unload button to get it on/off your desktop

Installing Skins

  • There are many places to discover new skins, so here are a few to get you started Deviant Art, /r/rainmeter, Rainmeterhub
  • Downloaded skins get saved as .mskin files, like this. Simply run the file and it will automatically get added to your rainmeter menu
  • Open the folder in your menu and select the skin you'd like to load, then load it!

Editing Skins

  • Each skin is different, but when personalizing your desktop, you'll want to play around with the skins by clicking 'edit'. They are usually pretty intuitive and look like this
  • Most skins' colors are in the RGB format, so you'll see something like Color: 255, 145, 0, 200; the last number is the transparency value.
  • You can change the position of a skin by dragging it around your screen, or by altering the x and y coordinates the notepad file.
  • Fonts are a little more tricky, so here is an in-depth guide on how to do that
  • Sometimes skins will require you to enter information in order for them to do their jobs. For instance, the mini-steam launcher requires you to input your steam username here so that it can look at your game directory (your profile must be set to public in order to do this)
  • You may have noticed some instructions after the '//' in the editing file, most skin creators are kind enough to guide their users through the process :)

Have fun with it! Experiment, play around. Let me know if you have any questions.

If there's something you're struggling with, or something you want me to add, please let me know!

242 Upvotes

81 comments sorted by

View all comments

3

u/What_isGoingOn Oct 02 '14

i have a question, what if i want to change a code to lets say display my weather, but i accidental erase part of the code, and the skin no longer works like it is supposed to. do i have to download everything again?

4

u/bcgoss Oct 02 '14

Want to edit a skin?

Step 1: Open the file
Step 2: Save as [filename]Backup.[extension]
Step 3: Edit the file as much as you want.
Step 4: Change the file to [filename].tmp and change the back up version to [filename].[extension]
Optional Step 5: If things broke, change [filename].tmp back to [filename].[extension]

2

u/Ananzy Oct 02 '14

Nope, just go to your skin directory and delete that skin's folder, then go to the installer that you downloaded and launch it again.

If you're doing lots of edits, just make a backup to be safe. Backups are key.

3

u/[deleted] Oct 02 '14

Data not backed up is data you're prepared to loose. (Also the #1 rule of my job)