Theme Creator (via HTML)
So I've been building a bunch of custom ES-DE themes lately and got so sick of hand-editing gamelist XML and guessing at pos/size values that I ended up building an actual **visual editor** for it. Figured I'd share since people still very much use EmulationStation/ES-DE and I don't think anything like this exists yet.
It's a browser-based drag-and-drop editor — you point it at your themes folder, it lists every theme inside, you pick one and every gamelist file shows up ready to click and load. From there you just drag elements around a live canvas instead of typing pos/origin/size by hand, resize from the corner, and everything updates in the inspector panel in real time.
The whole idea was to make this work whether you've *never* touched a theme file or you've been doing this for years:
* **User Mode** — adds plain-English explanations everywhere. Hover anything and it tells you what it does in normal words, not ES-DE jargon.
* **Expert Mode** — strips all that hand-holding out once you don't need it anymore.
* A built-in glossary for stuff like `${tokens}`, pos vs origin, size vs maxSize, etc.
**Some of the actual functionality:**
* Opens your real theme folder via the browser's file system access (Chrome/Edge only) and can save changes *straight back to disk*, or export as a .zip/.xml if you'd rather download
* Renders your actual art/video files on the canvas instead of placeholder boxes, and can even pull real game names/art from your ROMs/gamelists + downloaded_media folder so you're previewing with real content instead of guessing
* Built-in validator that catches ES-DE mistakes I've personally gotten burned by (invalid properties on the wrong element, missing positions, etc.)
* A few starter templates (card layout, carousel, grid) so you're not starting from a blank canvas
* Remembers your folders/settings between sessions so you're not re-picking everything every time
* Floating panels you can drag around and rearrange, undo/redo, a few color themes if you're picky about how your tools look
It's a single HTML file — no install, no server, nothing leaves your computer.
Still very much a work in progress and I'm sure there's edge cases in real ES-DE themes I haven't accounted for, but figured this community especially would get some use out of it or at least have opinions on what's missing.
**Coming soon to my GitHub** — cleaning it up a bit more before I push it up, but wanted to get eyes on it and hear what people think first.