The killer feature request (maybe impossible to do on windows)

[isd]

I suggest a feature I thought about using gmail search.

When you search for mails with "donation coder" in gmail you have a "search results" page you can browse.
You can look at the first message, the continue to the next, or come back to the search results page.

In short, you have defined a sub-domain of your data, and you can quietly search within this restricted domain.

What I would like FARR to do is for example:
You browse a directory "my images", and you want to display only the images of your last trip to the moon
So you type " myimages\ TAB moon", but then you want to browse these pictures, and these pictures only.
So it would be nice to have a feature that displays all the listed files in a virtual folder, so you can browse it with your favorite apps or whatever.

I guess the windows file system won't allow this to become reality but at least I tried to ask.
Thanks.

[Nod5]

hi isd!
This sounds like a neat feature It might be possible to do via a plugin. After the  " myimages\ TAB moon" search, once you've gotten the list of results, you would press a hotkey (or select a context menu command or something like that) and then a FARR plugin starts, the plugin then displays all and only image files from the results as clickable thumbnails in a html view mode page (similar to the AlbumDisplayer plugin perhaps). Would that be similar to what you had in mind? Clicking an thumbnail could perhaps then make FARR open the fullsize in the default browser. The hard part would be to write the plugin of course I don't have time to make an attempt at the moment but maybe someone else does. (the code in the AlbumDisplayer files can of course be reused in any way if that would be to some help)

[isd]

I was thinking this functionality not only for images in fact..., but since it would be even harder to do just images would be nice enough (if a lot of formats would be recognized, like PSD, RIFF etc...)
Putting the search results in a "virtual" windows folder would let us use any application to view the images (or anything else) so we could see any format, or create "work folders" on the fly.

(it would be nice to be able to make a second search to add to a previous work folder also)

I think it is the funtionality I'd like to have built in in any OS (being able to quickly create group of files without having to bother where they could be on the HD. And manage these groups... It may look like the tag system... but since it would managed with FARR it looks like it would be a lot more usable)

[skajfes]

Hm, that sounds like Directory Opus's File Collection feature. It enables you to create virtual folders in which you can put any file on your hard drive. These are not copies of files but links to files, much like hard links in *nix systems, so every change you make to the file in the collection is made on the real file.

The only problem is how to accomplish that in FARR. Directory Opus uses xml files to describe what is in those folders. Now following the same model we could make a plugin that would simply display files listed in such xml configuration file in FARR's output window like normal search results and that would enable direct operation on files from one place. However this behavior is somewhat similar to group aliases which already exists in FARR. The way I see it, it is somewhat impossible to make "real" virtual folders like Control Panel that could be accessed from Windows Explorer (and so any favorite app for viewing files, images etc...) and FARR without maybe some 3rd party software that could enable that for FARR.

[Nod5]

To move forward with this idea, maybe we should brainstorm concerning what features any 3rd party tool should have to help achieve what isd requests. Here are some suggestions:

(1) very small and quick to launch
(2) free
(3) supports the relevant sort of "virtual folders" or groupings
(4) can be controlled from FARR or from a FARR-plugin
(5) the groupings can be saved in some way (two versions: save a list of paths to the files OR save the exact search that was used to find them in FARR. The latter would be some sort of FARR search bookmarks.)

I'm imagining a file browser window that behaves sort of like Windows Explorer's search result window: it lists a number of files from various places on the harddisk(s) as if they were all in one folder, it allows you to operate on the files (move, copy, execute...), it allows several different views (thumbnails, as a list, detailed view...).

I can think of two types of candidates for this:
1. some standalone file manager ( http://en.wikipedia....son_of_file_managers ). A problem is that most are very feature rich all purpose file managers, where we really need something as minimalistic as possible (but still with support for grouping).
2. a dedicated FARR plugin that has the sought after features. Maybe made in autohotkey or some other language. This in turn would probably depend on there already existing some modules in these languages that can be used to achieve the virtual folder/grouping feature.

This thread from 2006 discusses just this kind of thing (though not in relation to FARR): https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=6419.0

[Nod5]

Some new thoughts on this:

What is the easiest way to pass the paths for all files currently in the match list to an autohotkey script?  (via command line or by saving them to a textfile and sending the file path to the script)

If we could just have that up and running then it would be easy to put together a small script that when started does this: (1) filters input paths for image files, (2) makes a temp folder (in FindAndRunRobot\MyLocalData\ ), (3) copies links to all image files to that folder, (4) opens that folder in thumbnail view mode, (5) cleans up when the user closes that folder and/or next time the script is run. That way a FARR search that returns a large number of image files can later be browsed as thumbnails.