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After disabling aliases to get around that bug, I discovered how nice searching for non-contiguous matches is. "add remove" brings up add and remove programs and so on. Even if I put a space in between every letter of my search I always get what I want as the first result, and quickly.

How about an option to treat all search terms as if there is a space between each letter? This would give a really fuzzy search. This could be overkill for file searching but would be really for people like me who only really use farr to launch start menu programs.

[Typing parts of aliases breaks non-contiguous matching]

I don't think this bug has been posted before:

Typing parts of aliases breaks non-contiguous matching

This is some strange and unpredictable behaviour that I found in v2 that I'm not sure if you'll be able to reproduce but here goes:

1. Type the first part of some alias for example: "wi", which is part of the wiki alias.
2. Type a space.
3. Now type another letter that should bring a result on your system but is not "k" or "i". Putting an "n" should suffice for most people.

Results should show every that contains "win" (at least) but there are no results and the status bar says "Searching partial aliases..." and doesn't change if left for a long time. This behaviour doesn't occur if the aliases are disabled which is what I've done for now.

I've just noticed that while in this state, FARR uses >90% of cpu power on my system. I never thought to check this before because it still feels perfectly responsive to the keyboard and mouse.


Also, I just thought I'd mention that many of the statusbar tips in the options are wrong and the "Check full path for search words..." option in the General tab doesn't appear to change anything or I can't figure out what it does. I know it's still beta and you've probably just not got round to the polishing but I just wanted to make sure you're aware.

Long story not so long.  When this bug is occurring, it is the equivalent of the ALT key being pressed down while you're typing.  Only keyboard shortcuts (or other ALT-based hotkeys) are active.

The mysterious holding down of ALT is a classic problem that I used to get a lot in windows before XP. Now it just happens to me every year or something. I notice that your FARR shortcut has an ALT in it so pressing that could start and stop the odd behaviour.

-Does the problem disappear when you press the ALT key?
-When this problem occurs, go to another application (NOT by alt-tab) and press a key. Does the behaviour persist?

Just thought I'd point out that it's not necessarily FARR's fault and it could be windows or even the keyboard.

None of this explains the beeping of course so I may be totally wrong but try it out anyway. =]

I would love to see a public release too. I've been checking this forum regularly for weeks now, since the first post in this thread promised a public beta on a certain date, so it's been a little bit frustrating. It would've been more so if I hadn't read about the good progress that appears to have been made in terms of features and bugfixes.

However, the fix for the bug that slows down window display is a MAJOR thing. There has always been an actually quite long (in computer terms) pause between rendering the FARR window and then displaying it's contents. I always thought of it as a necessary wait rather than a bug so I was glad to hear that it has been banished. It even seems like it would be worth releasing a fix for it in v1 to tide over non beta users until v2, if it would be easy to do.

After all that, I hope you don't mind if I throw in a feature request here: Hide system tray icon. I never use it and it just wastes space down there. Of course, if this feature were implemented then running the FARR exe would have to show the FARR window instead of starting another instance. WinPatrol has this feature. It's another absolutely essential program for windows. So much so that I wouldn't ever dream of closing it. I think of it as a service and am happy to have it running constantly without my approval. This feature would be great in FARR because I think of it almost in the same way.

Actually, now that I've posted I may as well ask that you send me the beta. I'd appreciate it.

Please, please do not let the tab key have anything to do with the functionality of v2. The tab key is terrible for any kind of navigation and it really annoys me that software uses for anything other than creating tabs in text files. The problem is that you have to cycle through items in a fixed order and to cycle backwards you must hold down shift and then press tab which is awkward and annoying. Any moving between potentially multiple text boxes should be done with the arrow keys.

Also, aside from being unnecessary, I think that the idea of multiple text boxes undermines the visual simplicity of FARR.


OK so after criticising your ideas let me be a little productive and contribute one of my own.

In the case of finding a file/shortcut and running it: v2 should behave exactly as it does now.

In the case of finding a file and performing a different action on it, in ADDITION to being able to type the action followed by the file (or however you choose to make the syntax work)...

...how about searching for the file in the normal way, selecting it by cursor keys, and then typing the action you want to perform on it. As a keypress other than enter is detected another text box pops up to the right of the item and searches for actions relevant to the file type similarly to the way that the main text box searches for files.

While all this is being done, perhaps the main text box could be automatically updated to reflect the action that the user is attempting in such a way that if you had typed it's contents into the main text box originally and pressed enter then exactly the same action would have been performed on exactly the same file.

Example:

User types "mp3 dylan" into main text box
10 results displayed
User keys down to the fourth one (4.mp3) and types play
By now the main text box has automatically changed it's contents to "play mp3 4.mp3" (or whatever you decide is best)
User presses enter. Action is performed
The entry in the history is "play mp3 4.mp3"

Perhaps some visual cue could exist to let users know that when they select an item they can type an action.
The advantage of this approach is that it guides users through the process of performing more complicated actions on files but also shows them how they could've saved time by typing the action and searching for the file at the same time in the main text box.

[Run Robot]

I don't think Find and Run Robot is a bad name but it's unnecessarily long. I think you should keep the Robot theme in there so you can keep the snazzy icon relevant.

So I suggest Run Robot or perhaps even Robot Run.

Short, snappy, alliterative, and recognisable from the original name.

Or F#

Wow, that's really useful. I didn't know about that one. Thanks.

If pressing enter automatically performs the first item in the list then why would you need to key down to it? It just makes it harder to get to the second item. Consider jumping straight to second item in list upon pressing the down key?

Actually since I made that post, I've done exactly the things you said and it works. Having said that, if FARR is going to get hotkey functionality anyway, then I'd rather use just one program to do both things, and if I wanted to change my config, I'd rather do it by GUI than text file. Thanks, though.

This is my first post on this forum and first I just want to say I love FARR and can't believe how I got by without it before I started using it yesterday.

Now to my question. From what I've gathered on this forum version 2 will have allow you to create global hotkeys to launch programs. I for one would love to see this implemented. Will setting global hotkeys work in the same way as setting the hotkey for FARR does at the moment? i.e. you click on a text field and actually perform the key presses.

I ask because I want to assign the extra buttons on my laptop's keyboard (e-mail, web browser, search) as hotkeys and the current FARR hotkey text field lets me do this (although the field remains empty, the hotkey still works). However, I have used other hotkey programs (such as Hotkeyz) which use these text fields for capturing key presses but don't recognise my extra buttons. I guess what I'm saying is, however you made that key capture text field, keep making them that way! =]