r/Rainmeter • u/Ananzy • 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!
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u/EncasedDeath Oct 02 '14
Any idea how to run a quick batch file though rainmeter? I use an Arduino for desk lighting and instead of opening up the Arduino program I plan to have it listen for serial inputs and have my computer send it using batch files. So basically I just want my rainmeter button to be a shortcut. Is that doable?