Previewing and Switching Personas - "Locally"

[LunaPallooza]

Being somewhat new to this whole customizing thing, and liking it, I figured I'd try out some Personas. Mmm, and probably spent way too much time perusing them all. Focus? What focus? Anyway, I downloaded and tried a bunch. Which is when I noticed something. It seems that when you download and switch personas, even if you've already downloaded it, the new one (that you're switching to) always Re-downloads from the server. Wuttup w/ that? Is there any way to download and switch locally w/out re-downloading again. And again and again and again - Wutta WOB (Waste of Bandwidth). Am I missing something here, or is that not just pure nonsense?

I've searched and can't find a way to download them and save them to the computer, other than one (Personas Plus extension) that does save locally to a JSON file, but that seems to only save a background color of the Persona and not the picture(s)/graphics.

Is there anything in the works that can be added to PM to be able to download permanently and switch locally without having to connect to a server again Every time you want to preview and / or switch to a different theme or Persona?

[loxodont]

Yes, it's annoying. Back then I often used FF as offline HTML reader when I suddenly noticed with FF28 or 29, not sure, my themes were gone.

I only use a few lightweight themes/personas and switch them manually in a rather weekly to monthly rotation - otherwise it would be to time consuming.
My personal workaround, in addition to Personas Plus I installed the Lightweight Themes Manager addon.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... src=search
It does NOT, like it suggests (too) save a theme to a handy file, but you can find out the URLs of the two needed header and footer images and load them down. They're loading as "header" and "footer.png", so to avoid later confusion I would give them an appropriate name and put them in their own directory, like /Pale Moon/Themes/Thistheme.

see attachment example pic

In a 2nd step, to make a locally loaded theme out of the two image files, go to the upper right box in LWThemes Manager, select "Edit Custom Persona" and in the opening box choose a name, select the two image files from the folder, optionally select a color for "accentcolor" (I use it for color of the thin bar of All-In-One-Sidebar AIOS).
Click OK, and this theme will be loaded from your local disk now.
Bad thing, if you edit a new custom theme, the old one disappears in the collection.

As I mentioned I wouldn't do it with a dozen themes in a fast rotation, but it's worth with a few themes and to avoid online connection, rating system, usage statistics, etc. ...

[LunaPallooza]

Awesome, thanks loxodont.

I knew there had to be some quickish fix or workaround to this. I had looked at that extension already, but missed that JSON source button. Was obviously in "quick scan" mode. I was thinking exactly the same thing though - if I could at least find something that could be "modified" somewhat easily to look for local source files.

At least until some hot-shot coder creates what we really want. Hello?? Ya, you know who you are out there!

So it doesn't retain your edits to a local version when you switch to another one, eh? Hmm, oh well, I suppose that's fine for now. Like you said, just pick a few favourites and change as needed. Not being a coffee or Red Bull drinker, really don't need to be switching every 10 minutes anyway. heh

And if I want, I can always take some screenshots of the themes I really like and save them to a folder and then preview them in my graphics / photo manager program to choose the one I want to switch to.

[loxodont]

sry, forgot to mention you have to check "developer mode" in the managers options box to make the JSON button visible ...
but glad to see it helped
greez