Allow pipette of any applicable LuaGuiElement

[Zomis]

A lot of mods use LuaGuiElements which are sprite-buttons or choose-elem-buttons to display items, fluids, signals, etc.

It would be very handy for a player to be able to pipette any of those buttons to set their cursor to that item, fluid, or virtual-signal.

[Rseding91]

They already can - for choose elem buttons. For sprite buttons the widget itself has no idea what the underlying prototype was so it simply doesn't work. It's like trying to pipette a png and expect the game logic to know "this PNG means iron-plate, this one means steam"

[Zomis]

I will admit that getting the sprite and converting it to a signal is a bit of a hack, but it's a hack worth making in my opinion. When the sprite path begins with "item/", or "fluid/", etc. then you DO know which the underlying game prototype is.

A choose-elem-button is either clickable and opens up the UI to choose another element, or it is not clickable at all. A lot of utility mods are using sprite-buttons with items, fluids and/or virtual signals.

It's really easy to figure out based on the sprite path if it is something pipettable (item, fluid, or signal), and the value of this would - for me, and I believe for many other players who play with more complicated mods - be massive.

When I play, I want to spend as little time as possible to accomplish what I want. Something that takes a lot of time is switching between mouse and keyboard, and currently this is something that is required to do whenever you need to select a signal for e.g. circuit conditions, inserter filters, or similar.

You might think that "Oh but searching is so quick", but no it isn't. Not when there's a gazillion different things called "tin" (PyBlock) and it's very easy to mistype on the keyboard when switching back and forth between keyboard and mouse.

I highly wish for either this feature or this modding interface feature be implemented. (If that modding interface would be implemented, then I could implement this feature myself in a mod).

[Rseding91]

There’s a disconnect here: the mod is dealing with that string but when the actual GUI widget is shown on screen it’s using the internal sprite representation which has no string to reference - just the GPU texture and size info.