Hi all,
just some simple new user questions...

1. panels ui seems to allow changes (color, look, theme, whatever?) to the foobar window itself as well as the 'panels' therein, whereas columns ui only allows you to change the panels inside the window. is that correct? Another way of asking the same question is: using columns ui can you change, for example, the background color of the menu toolbar? or the color of the splitters between panels?
2. some of the more popular configurations around require both panels ui and columns ui. I thought you selected one or the other in preferences, so why do you need both? does that mean theres other components contained in the configuration of which panels is a dependency, but the config itself is based on columns ?


I guess what I'm sortof struggling with is, the panelsui configs look way better than anything I've been able to create (or even see the possibility to create) using just columns ui. I thought of installing an older version of foobar and getting stuck into some scripting with panels ui, but is it really worth learning the scripting for a component which is already obsolete. (having only novice programming abilities) or is there lots of other stuff I can do with columns ui that I'm just not seeing? or is it a matter of using other components to work with columns ui to do a lot of the stuff that panels ui used to?

Thanks in advance for your help, I'm sure lots of people have wondered the same stuff in the past, but searching through this forum over the last couple of days I'm starting to get the feeling that Im going around in circles. Even if you can point me in the right direction.. I'm happy to do the reading.

1: As far as I know, you cannot change the colors of those things in Columns UI. (I don't even know if you can affect them all with Panels UI, but I suspect that there are a lot of things you can do there that you can't with Columns.)

2: Yes, there are components within Panels UI that can be accessed via Columns UI if desired. (This is how my own current setup works; I use Columns UI for the general framework, but use the Track Display and Single Column Playlist panels from Panels.)

There is a plugin called foo_uie_panel splitter which allows things similar to panel ui. So this answer isn't correct.

So is foo_uie_panel_splitter included with vanilla Columns UI? I guess not.

No, you don't have to waste your time to learn the titleformatting scripts if (1) the development of a plugin has ceased and (2) the plugin is no longer supported by the latest version of foobar. But, if you are a fanboy of the plugin, you can do whatever you like.

Probably not; it will take you a while, and probably in the next year a usable replacement will pop up that does a lot of the same things (there's panel splitter, but it doesn't look to be a lot easier to use for someone with "novice programming abilities.")

But if you have a lot of spare time and you really want FB2K to work in a particular way, then go for it.