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Faerie: Prototyping the end of Tweaker

I spent a bit of time in the last few months working on one of the components of the GIEPY standardization project. The result of this work is the early alpha version of Faerie.

Faerie (name still pending) strives to be the future replacement of Tweaker and all variations of the CFG Editor. It can edit all types of configuration files and ROMs and it will be able to manage auxiliary Lunar Magic files.

As of today, Faerie is in an open alpha. The editor as a whole is mostly usable but lacks significant features and polish. The biggest problem right now is the interface, which will hopefully change in the beta. You may download the alpha version of Faerie from its GitHub release page. Feel free to report bugs and feature suggestions as issues on the repository (or, alternatively, as replies to this thread). Faerie is a Java 8 desktop application which requires the JRE to run.
Is there anything concrete that you want tested right now? Since none of the output file types are supported yet, I assume the only thing you want feedback on is the interface, right?

One minor thing I would change is the default file type for saving files (whenver that's supported). I would pick JSON (or YAML, if we go with that) as the default file type for saving files since a lot of people will probably just save their files in the default extension without thinking too much about it, so the default here should be whatever our recommended format in the future will be.

Not too much to comment on the interface of the main application. It's kinda overwhelming, but then so where all CFG editors in the past. I can't really think of reasonable ways of changing that in the first place.
Feel free to visit my website/blog - it's updated rarely, but it looks pretty cool!
Just by looking at the GUI I can tell this tool is going to be way superior to CFG Editor or Tweaker.

Later I'll try to cause some bugs on purpose to report any problem.

A feature that could be included for further development would be the possibility to see the sprite image and description for sprites for the "acts like" number, actually, a search engine similar to the one used in Lunar Magic would be pretty useful.

Also, the possibility to import custom palettes would be a nice touch for people that heavily modify graphics for their hacks.

Current project: working on a personal website and a portfolio.
Before anything, I should point out issue #6, which was pointed out by LX5 on Discord (and, indirectly, by RPG Hacker). The tool uses Java's default file choosers with little actual modification, so saving dialogs will not automatically append file extensions. This means that if you try to save a configuration file without explicitly typing its extension, the tool will just report it as an unsupported file type.

Originally posted by RPG Hacker
One minor thing I would change is the default file type for saving files. I would pick JSON as the default file type for saving files since a lot of people will probably just save their files in the default extension without thinking too much about it, so the default here should be whatever our recommended format in the future will be.

I haven't done any organization with the file types because GIEPY is also in the middle of switching. In the future, it will drop JSON support in favor of the backward-compatible YAML and UCL formats. Faerie will support saving to them and the one we use in the sections will be the default one.

Originally posted by RPG Hacker
Not too much to comment on the interface of the main application. It's kinda overwhelming, but then so where all CFG editors in the past. I can't really think of reasonable ways of changing that in the first place.

This is reported as issue #4. The user interface is bulky and it's based on the previous CFG Editors. It will definitely change in the future, though I still don't know how. Fluid interfaces in Swing are a little weird. Faerie uses IntelliJ's grid manager, which obviously restricts me to a bulky grid.

Originally posted by Kixune
A feature that could be included for further development could be the possibility to see the sprite image and description for sprites for the "acts like" number, actually, a search engine similar to the one used in Lunar Magic would be pretty useful.

This is a really nice idea. I've put it on GitHub as issue #7 and I hope to be able to tackle it along with the new interface.

Originally posted by Kixune
Also, the possibility to import custom palettes would be a nice touch for people that heavily modify graphics for their hacks.

This is already supported internally (see the palette field in Application.java). There's just currently no way of replacing the loaded palette through the user interface.
Another suggestion I have: dragging & dropping a file onto the application window should automatically open that file in Faerie (after asking to save/discard the current changes, if necessary). It's a feature I use very often and always miss when it's not present in an application.
Feel free to visit my website/blog - it's updated rarely, but it looks pretty cool!
Originally posted by RPG Hacker
Another suggestion I have: dragging & dropping a file onto the application window should automatically open that file in Faerie (after asking to save/discard the current changes, if necessary). It's a feature I use very often and always miss when it's not present in an application.

This is a feature which is already planned, I just never got around to it for the alpha. Regardless, I've opened it as issue #9 on GitHub.