Rainmeter 4.1 Release

There are a lot of new features and capabilities in the latest Rainmeter 4.1. You can safely install the new 4.1
release version right over your existing Rainmeter 4.0 or any earlier installation, and nothing you have done will be lost or changed. There is never any need to uninstall any earlier version of Rainmeter to use the newest version.

Note: Rainmeter 4.1 will run on Microsoft Windows 7 through 10. Windows XP and Vista are not supported.

Major additions and changes in Rainmeter 4.1

Variables

Added an alternative nesting variables syntax, to enable nesting variables, section variables, and mouse variables inside each other. See Nesting Variables for details.

Added Character Reference Variables to allow plain-text coding of Unicode characters and symbols, as well as icons from specialized fonts like FontAwesome. See Character Reference Variables for details.

FontWeight

Added new FontWeight option to the String meter. This much more powerful option should be used in place of StringStyle going forward.

Bangs

New !EditSkin bang. Opens the current or a specified skin .ini file in the text editor defined in ConfigEditor in the Rainmeter settings, or associated with .ini files in Windows. The default will be Windows Notepad.exe.

Added new !FadeDuration and !FadeDurationGroup bangs to set the FadeDuration in milliseconds when activating/deactivating a skin, using the fade-in / fade-out effects on mouse over, or when the fade bangs are used.

Drag Groups

Drag Groups can now be created by selecting skins while holding CTRL-ALT. Dragging one skin, or nudging with the arrow keys will move all selected skins. See Multiple Skins for details.

Lua Scripting

Added inline Lua section variables, to support an inline return of a value from Lua with a function() call or by retrieving a variable. See Inline Lua for details.

Due to recent changes made in how each Lua script maintains its own distinct state in the Rainmeter environment, we have been able to add the dofile, debug, setfenv, getfenv and coroutine functionality back into the Lua package.

About Dialog

There have been several improvements to the About dialog. This should be of further assistance when debugging your skins.

  • The Skins panel now shows both the "number" and "string" value of measures, and indicates when a measure is either disabled, paused, or both. See Skins Tab for details.
  • Added a right-click context menu to the Skins tab to copy the "number", "string" and "range" values to the clipboard.
  • Added a right-click context menu to copy the value of Variables in the Skins tab to the clipboard.
  • Added a right-click context menu to the Log panel to copy the error and source (if available) to the clipboard.
  • The Plugins tab will now group the plugins as "External" or "Built-in".
  • Added several plugins that have been converted to measures to the Plugins tab to reduce confusion with missing .dll files.
  • Adjusted the column width on the Plugins tab to automatically fit the longest plugin name, and widened the overall size of the About dialog a bit.

Plugin API and SDK

Plugin authors are strongly encouraged to get the latest Plugin SDK and review the new Developer Documentation.

Added the ability in the Plugin API to create plugins in C++ or C# supporting Inline Plugin Section Variables in a skin. This is primarily a change for plugin authors, with any documentation for how their plugins should be used in a skin provided by the author. Details on how this can be used in a plugin are at C++ and C#.

The documentation for plugin authors has been greatly enhanced and improved, and new and improved example plugins added to the SDK.

Other enhancements and fixes in Rainmeter 4.1

CoreTemp Plugin: The author of both the CoreTemp application and Rainmeter plugin, Arthur Liberman, added CPU core-specific values to the data available in the plugin. See CoreTemp plugin for details.

Manage dialog: When a skin is selected in the Skins list, the Enter key will toggle loading and unloading the skin.

Illustro default skins: Changed the URL used to get the user's WAN IP address in the Network skin in Illustro. Note that Illustro will not be installed or updated on existing Rainmeter installations, only on new installations, and this change should be manually made if Illustro is currently being used.

PCRE Regular Expressions: Added UCP support to the regular expression library, to enable \X \P \p in expressions.

Net measures: Added a new UseBits option to return the value of NetIn / NetOut / NetTotal measures in bits rather than the default bytes.

Formulas: Added new Deg math function to convert radians to degrees.

Shape meter: Added Path1 alternative of the Path shape. It will use a different form of the SVG fill-rule when the shape is filled with a color or gradient. This determines what parts of a shape with intersecting segments are "inside" the shape and what are "outside", for purposes of filling the shape with the defined color or gradient. See Path1 shape for details.

Bitmap meter: Changed the allowable measure value when BitmapExtend=1 from a C-language int data type (2,147,483,647 maximum) to int64 (9,223,372,036,854,775,807 maximum).

Variables: New #CONFIGEDITOR# built-in variable. The path and executable for the text editor defined in ConfigEditor in Rainmeter settings, or the text editor associated with .ini files in Windows. The default will be Windows Notepad.exe.

Version history and details