IniWatcher

A lightweight program to watch the status of an ini file key value.

What does it do?

The IniWatcher watches a given value of an INI file (a list of lines with key=value) and checks if it is a certain, predefined value. If it is, a small window overlay shows "Enabled", otherwise it's "Disabled".

It currently does not support sections as I didn't need that. If you need that, feel free to open an issue or a pull request.

Since it's supposed to be as small as it can be, it doesn't feature more than a small window and the possiblity to remember its window location. You can exit the program by using the ALT+F4 shortcut after clicking on the window.

Build

To build the program yourself, you can use the gcc from MinGW for Windows:

gcc -Wall -std=c99 -mwindows -s iniwatcher.c inistatusreader.c -o bin\IniWatcher.exe -lgdi32 -lshlwapi 

Note: The -s option strips symbol information for a smaller file size, so if you want to debug the application, don't use it. Note, too: If you need debug console output, don't use -mwindows. That one is just there to prevent needing a console window in addition to the GUI.

To build with MSVC (resulting in a larger file size), use the following command:

cl iniwatcher.c inistatusreader.c gdi32.lib shlwapi.lib user32.lib shell32.lib /Fe:bin\IniWatcher.exe

Usage

Example INI file "settings.ini"

key=value
abc=moretest
enabled=true
reward=sink

If you call the IniWatcher with the following command line ..

IniWatcher.exe -file settings.ini -key enabled -value true

.. you see the current state (disabled/enabled) of the given switch and you can update it by hovering over it with the mouse since it only updates on window redraws. Again, it's supposed to be as simple and silent as possible at this point.

Why?

I wanted to try programming directly with the Win32 API and needed to permanently display the status of a certain switch of an INI file. Secondly, I needed to see the current status without navigating to and opening the file every time.

Note that, while I tried to write it as good and clean as possible, the code was written with not a lot of time on my hands, so.. don't expect too much.