Does anyone know how to search for references of certain assets? An example is itemborderessential.png in /interface/inventory, under playerinventory.config (in /interface/windowconfig) it itsn't referenced, leading me to think it's handled somewhere else, but after a couple hours of digging I couldn't find it. I wonder if a dirty edit is the only way, since Elithian does the same.
Much of the inventory interface functionality is hard coded, yes. For this reason I cannot script it Now as for searching for references to assets, just string search. There are many ways to do so, but I prefer Notepad++ as it has a great interface for this. "Find in Files" tab of the search interface <CTRL> + <F> And search your base folder for the unpacked assets. It will search recursively.
This is what I use: https://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack/. You can search for file names and file contents.
Thanks bk3k, that was exactly what I was looking for. It makes me sad too that it's hardcoded, atleast they have the priority system so I don't have to worry about other mods overwriting the item borders.