readme to explain repo usage

[hannesdelbeke]

hi

i haven't made the time yet to look into the code what repos do exactly. only saw the dir(maya.cmds) bit so far.
i assume it's custom commands from a folder.
It d be great if you could find some time to add a quick brief to the readme on what repos do and how to use them.
and any limitations? like multiple repos at same time?

great little tool btw :)

[csaez]

Hi Hannes,

That's a great point... basically a repo is a directory where you can put python scripts (o mel files if you feel so inclined) that then will be available from the quicklauncher menu automatically.

Let's say you add a hello.py file to the repo directory that prints hello world. Well, now there will be an entry for it on the quicklauncher autocomplete and you can invoke the script just like anything else by typing he enter.

This is really the most useful way to use quicklauncher imho, as it allows you to personalise the usage beyond vanilla Maya. Depending on your workflow (or where you work), it's very likely that you have to hunt down in the GUI the many custom tools written in python required to do the job, and what better way to do this than actually nor hunting down for anything and just type the first few letters of your custom script launching the thing.

Does it makes sense?

[hannesdelbeke]

yes that makes sense

[hannesdelbeke]

i guess ideally every plugin has a MpxCommand, which would be auto exposed in maya.cmds., so auto added to the quicklauncher.
But for plugins where that's not the case, add_repo can be used to support running custom scripts.

[csaez]

The world is a wonky beautiful place 🙃

In the meantime, the repo feature supporting custom scripts helps users living in an imperfect world to build a nice-ish workflow having the tools they use all the time at their fingertips.