The idea being that they would be merged into the 'My Recent Documents' result list? Yes, that would be an idea.

right, which would also let people who always wanted their office files shown in main mru list do that, and add any such entries to the main mru list.

I was also thinking about a modifier that would list all of the configured applications mru files. I think that would serve the FARR filtering idea better.

that would also be a good idea; you can do that by deteced when user types mrua
and return a result list like
mru office | restartsearch mru +office
mru foxit pdf reader| restartsearch mru +foxit
that essentially lets you make a menu of choices for the user that farr will present

-mouser (July 01, 2008, 02:52 PM)

To follow up on mouser's idea. What do you guys think about the following (the aliases being examples)?

mrum - list only 'My Recent Documents' (what mru with no program modifiers does now)
mrup - list MRU items of all configured programs (what mru with all program modifers added would do now)
mrua - list everything (mrum and mrup combined)
mru - list a combination of mrum and user selected modifiers (definable in the options dialog)

Btw I use the SoftMaker Office suite, which stores all settings, including recent files in .ini files like this:

[Select]

[tmw History]
HistoryFile0=15,D:\firstfile.doc
HistoryFile1=15,D:\afile.doc
HistoryFile2=15,D:\thefile.doc
HistoryFile3=15,D:\someotherfile.doc

I realize that's quite a difference from the way recent files are read now, but would it be possible for FARRMRU to read settings from ini files as well? I've got a couple of other apps (portable) that also stores recent file list in ini format. The user would still have to provide the format that FARRMRU should read, of course. Maybe too much to ask for, but it would certainly be useful (to me, at least :-[ ).

-TucknDar (July 02, 2008, 02:04 AM)

I'll consider adding this. I could well imagine that their are quite a number of applications storing their MRU files in a ini file instead of in the registry.

First: Thanks for all the compliments! :D

Second a clarification:
FARR MRU currently shows either the contents of the 'My Recent Documents' (XP) resp. 'Recent Items' (Vista, but see remark in readme.txt) folder or the most recently used files of one or more applications specified by modifiers. I.e. if you just type mru, you'll get only 'My Recent Documents', if you add something like +msvc9, you'll get only the most recently used Visual Studio 9 files. You could then add +office and would get all MSVC9 files plus all Office files, but you currently can't get them in the same list as your 'My Recent Documents' files.

To the suggestions:

Could you implement a way to add any of installed programs like PSPAD, Netbeans etc. ?

They can be added already if they store their mru files in the registry in the format as described in the readme.txt.

An idea:
maybe the first entry in the config file could be like:
Code:

+|DefaultMRU
list of reg keys to check and show by default

that way a user who wanted to could modify the list of reg keys that got checked for the default mru display, and could even add reg keys from certain programs they wanted to show by default.

The idea being that they would be merged into the 'My Recent Documents' result list? Yes, that would be an idea. I was also thinking about a modifier that would list all of the configured applications mru files. I think that would serve the FARR filtering idea better.

The mru for acrobat is a bit different

I'll maybe look into it. Uh, that means I need to install Adobe Acrobat Reader, nooooo.

For your MRUing pleasure, here are some I got from my system

I'll add the ones you say they work and check out the others if I can.

I had to change the office MRUs to Office2003

Would you mind posting the Office 2003 registry paths here. I don't have Office 2003 installed but would like to add those.

btw many of the file extensions in the ComdDlg32\OpenSaveMRU key are very useful to me

These would actually already work in 0.1.0, provided your running Windows XP. Apart from mru registry entries of the form 'File 1', 'File 2', etc. I have also implemented the ones which use a MRUList value with a, b, c, etc. I haven't seen anything other than explorer use it though. And in Windows Vista Microsoft changed these to MRUListEx with no clear-text paths, but some binary data. Additionally, you would currently need to specify each registry key individually, i.e. something like:
just as some examples, you would need to add all which are relevant to you. Obviously, it would be better if FARR MRU would scan everything underneath HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ComDlg32\OpenSavelMRU\.

i did not manage to make it work for photoshop MRU

I have Photoshop Elements. I'll check it out.


Thanks for all your feedback and suggestions! I'm always open to more suggestions to make this plugin more useful.