Messages

1

General Software Discussion / Re: BULK Rename Utility

« on: April 02, 2012, 06:18 PM »

@Curt:  You wrote: "BRU was extensively updated in the following 3 years, and is now considered bug-free".
It's true BRU is an outstanding product; however, there are a number of serious bugs that remain, especially regarding filenames that contain diacritics or non-English characters. For instance, Regex backreferences within BRU completely ignore any such characters, potentially resulting in seriously maligned filenames (see a more detailed description of this bug here: http://www.bulkrenam...c.php?f=4&t=1528).
Thus, although it may be a solid product for English-only filenames, users with a wider character set should be wary. Note also that although the reporting of bugs continues on the BRU forum, as far as I can tell there is unfortunately not much development going on there anymore.

2

Find And Run Robot / Feature Request: multilanguage keystroke reinterpretation

« on: September 24, 2009, 02:40 AM »

The main point of FARR is to launch things ultra-fast, without pausing for mouse clicks or other niceties. However, one item which the user still must do first is to switch the keyboard into the correct language.
For instance, on my computer I have both Hebrew and English keyboards installed. If my active keyboard happens to be Hebrew when I launch FARR, and I try to type in "notepad", what I will get instead is a jumble of hebrew letters ("מםאקפשג").
Google has actually implemented a feature which takes care of this in its search engine: when a bunch of nonsensical foreign language characters are entered, google's search suggest feature automatically calculates what the search term would have been if the same keystrokes had been pressed with the English keyboard active, and it presents search suggest terms based upon that calculation.
I'd like to see FARR do something similar. The basic implementation would go as follows:
- If the characters entered into FARR are not english characters, FARR should calculate the English characters which correspond to those foreign-language keystrokes. The results box should of course first show items which match the foreign characters, but after that it should also display items which match the corresponding English keystorkes.
- As a second stage, you might want to make this configurable to work in the other direction as well: that is, a user might want English keystrokes to also display results for certain foreign-language equivalents. FARR would do this for any of the currently installed keyboards.

Thank you,
Avi Shmidman

3

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: Post your FARR v2 Plugin Idea Requests Here - Plugin Writers Read In

« on: August 23, 2009, 08:44 AM »

I'd like to suggest two interrelated ideas for plugins, both relating to the use of FARR to bring currently running windows/applications to the foreground.

1] Using FARR as an alternative to alt-tab to selecte a currently running window/app
With FARR installed on my machine I find that it is much much easier to run a new program than to find one which is already running! Running a new program with FARR takes only milliseconds, but searching the couple of dozen icons in my taskbar for the one I want takes far longer. Cycling through the alt-tab list is even more laborious, because all microsoft office documents receive their own little icon on the alt-tab list, and since I regularly have 30-40 docs open in Word at a given time, it is nearly impossible to find the one I want!
I'd like FARR to first try to match my input to one of the currently running applications or open windows (I suppose it would be best to first try to match the window caption of an open window, and if not, to try to match to a process name among the running processes).
I would further be interested in the option of limiting FARR to match windows of one specific process. For instance, this would allow me to create a hotkey to launch FARR and to use it specifically to locate one of my open Microsoft Word documents.

2] My second request is for FARR to provide the user with a single-stop option to either switch to a given app if it is running, or if not, to run the application.
Often I find that I want to use a given app (say, calc.exe), but I don't know whether I am running the app or not. Searching through alt-tab or the taskbar is laborious, as noted above, so in these cases I usually just run another instance of the given program with FARR. However, this creates clutter on the machine, and not all apps do a good job running multiple instances. Thus, it would be ideal if I could configure FARR such that after selecting an application to run, FARR would first check to see whether the application is already running, and if so, FARR would give me the option (via a single keypress) to decide whether to launch a new one or whether to just bring the current one to the foreground.