running an esptool command from the IDE [SOLVED]

You're welcome. Let me know if you need any help finding the platform.txt file. You might check whether you can use the platform.local.txt feature:

I couldn't remember whether that overrides the properties in platform.txt, but from the documentation it sounds like it does. The benefit of platform.local.txt is that you can make your customizations in that file instead of needing to modify platform.txt, then save a copy of your platform.local.txt. That way, when you update to a new version of the ESP32 core and your modifications are lost you can just copy your platform.local.txt back into the folder.

Note that you need to restart the Arduino IDE before any changes you make to platform.txt or platform.local.txt will take effect.