DonationCoder.com Software > Find And Run Robot

Looking for a little help with arguments.

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Ghostly:
I use wordweb as my dictionary software. I like it because I can do offline searches on definitions and that makes my life alot easier. Anyway, i'm trying to make a alias that will launch wordweb with a predefined word in the search box, but i'm not sure what arguments to use for this, considering that I don't know anything about arguments to begin with and there is little help within FARR's help files. If anyone could help me with this problem it would be most appreciated.

mouser:
Hi Ghostly.

Using wordweb with FARR:
https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=7989.0

NOTE:
I believe that wordweb is already configured in a built-in FARR v2 alias called "define", so if you type "define ghost" youll see wordweb at the end of the list.  But you can go inspect the define alias in the Linguistics alias group in options to see how it's done.

Ghostly:
Thanks for your help Mouser. The code works perfectly. Also, I originally looked in the "define" alias to see if wordweb was in there. For some reason I only saw the wordweb website addition and totally missed the native wordweb command. When you mentioned it I took a second look and found it at the end there. *feels stupid* Anyway, thanks for the speedy reply. I've tested alot of launchers out there and non of them have been able to reach the levels of customization that FARR does. Keep up the good work.

JLeiderman:
I am new to FARR, after trying -- and dropping -- most of the competitors (Launchy, Slickrun, Keybreeze, etc.) and am really impressed thus far (FARR?).  I have a reasonable understanding of reg expressions, though I am still figuring out aliases. 

What mystifies me as a new user is why there is apparently no native, out-of-the-box handling of arguments.  For example, I am very happy to discover that entering k- in the box brings up k-meleon browser at the top of the search list, I hit tab, Enter, and launch the browser. 

However, if try to give it an argument in the box,

    C:\Program Files\K-Meleon\k-meleon.exe  www.google.com

on hitting return I get nothing.  It seems to me that launching a program this way with argument(s) would be the expected default (i.e. no alias) behavior, or, I guess, the behavior I would want.  Just as I can type in a dos console

    "C:\Program Files\K-Meleon\k-meleon.exe" www.google.com

and launch an instance of the browser with the URL. (Parens required -- but couldn't FARR even make them unnecessary?)

I won't be surprised if I am missing something simple.  Apologies in advance if this is a stupid question, and thanks for your hard work and really impressive coding.



PS Just now it occurs to me I can use

     run C:\Program Files\K-Meleon\k-meleon.exe www.google.com

which works nicely, but if I start by typing run k-.... FARR finds a list of Rs rather than Ks.  Does this mean in order to make use of *any* arguments, the user is obliged to have set up an alias in advance?  Thanks again.

mouser:
i think you are right in everything you are saying, and you've made a convincing case that FARR needs a simple way to provide arguments to a program you are about to launch.

can we come up with a general purpose syntax for this?

note that it cannot be as simple as saying that everything after the program name is an argument, because by default FARR wants to use additional typed words to filter the search.

it needs to be something like:

k-meleon :: args_go_here
C:\Program Files\K-Meleon\k-meleon.exe  www.google.com :: args_go_here

where :: is a special separator meaning EVERYTHING after this on the search string will be treated as arguments passed to an executable launched.

it might be nice if instead of :: we used something more flexible for other purposes, for example some syntax like:
k-meleon /ARGS args_go_here

So that we could use /KEYWORD for other special stuff

Or we could use our existing + prefix that we use for modifiers and say that some modifier keywords are reserved for special purposes.  this might make sense, so that
k-meleon +args args_go_here

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