Maybe I should I step back from the bleeding edge!?!?

Hi all-

First, some brief, semi-relevant personal history:  I'm a high school physics teacher and I've been running linuxcnc for quite a while- my first exposure to cnc (of any sort) was receiving an EMC-BDI cdrom via snail mail from Ray Henry in the late 1990s. I've always been a midnight engineer type, messing around with electronics & recreational programming from an early age.  So I think it would be fair to say that I am 'the target audience' for linuxcnc as I'm sure many of you are as well.

It's often said that linuxcnc has a steep learning curve, and while that might sound like a bad thing to some folks, to me (and I'll bet to a lot of us) it translates to 'really fun, interesting challenge'.  And that's fine.  But I'm at the point where (again, like a whole lot of us) I'd love nothing more than to really be able customize my machine's UI.  No doubt there are an awful lot of users who feel the same way (not to mention who-knows-how-many prospective linuxcnc users).  And since I'm now running 2.9, and have the qtdragon_hd config going, and the Qt development environment set up...my dreams of fiddling around with it like it was written in Visual Basic seem like they might be coming true.

Except it looks like I'm back to scouring the Web endlessly for tiny but relevant snippets of documentation, comparing & contrasting competing advice from all directions, and generally hoping like hell I can massage all that into a working system.  It's basically what I've been doing off and on (mostly on, it seems!) for about 25 years, and what I'll no doubt keep doing.  CNC is, after all, basically magic.  I've made a lot of cool stuff over the years and I'm going to keep at it!

I understand full well that for us to have collectively gotten as far with CNC as we have on a volunteer basis is fairly miraculous.  I will never be able to properly thank all the unbelievably talented and generous people 'behind the scenes', and I'm not arguing that they need to (or really, can do) any more than they already are.  I only wish I was capable of making a real contribution to the cause.  [Or, I'd pay cold hard cash to support a Kickstarter that would allow some of these folks produce the final product that we're all dreaming of, if such a thing were possible!]

Anyway, if you've read this far, thank you.  I do have a specific-ish question- here's a line from one of the QtVCP webpages that kind of sums up my current frustration:

If you wish to modify a stock screen with full control, copy its UI and handler file to your configuration folder.

That's sure what I wish to do!  But as far as qtdragon_hd is concerned, I can find no ui file at all (which I had hoped to modify with QtDesigner) and the only .py file involved seems to be resources.py which is about a half a megabyte of this:

\x31\x83\x90\x46\xfa\x54\x09\xe6\xb0\x5f\x47\x8a\x82\x84\x01\x41\
\x30\x31\x42\x33\x02\x90\x2e\x25\x62\xbf\x18\x20\xee\xb2\x62\x00\
\x30\x09\xcc\x30\xd9\x87\x4d\xd0\xa1\xc1\x30\x12\xc2\xc8\x20\x18\

<sigh>  Any suggestions?

regards,
Patrick

ps - I'll attach what I got from running   

Sorry the name got changed:

qtvcp copy

Can you pint out the docs you found the copy_dialog text in? I wish to update the right name.

Can you pint out the docs you found the copy_dialog text in? I wish to update the right name.

see section 2.8.3 here:
linuxcnc.org/docs/devel/html/gui/qtvcp.html