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FARR version 2 - discuss the best way to handle 'actions'

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mouser:
here's another theoretical, consistent solution that would have the benefit of clarity and ease of use.

what if you ALWAYS got a second prompt.

so you type "et." and up come the results as nontroppo shows.
you hit enter or alt+1 or whatever you currently use in FARR to "launch" the app, but
in this new approach,
that doesnt trigger immedate launching.
instead it progresses you to stage 2, action selection mode,
where the textbox is cleared and you see the prompt
"With Ethereal.link do:"
and then your results list is now filled with actions, the first of which would always be "Launch"
so you could hit enter again to launch it, or do an incremental search on the actions list,
or use a number to choose a specific action..

we could also offer the ability to bypass this 2 stage mode depending on alt+ctrl key states..

yes it requires an extra keypress, and having a searchable action list is not trivial, but its at least comprehensible.

mouser:
yet another possibility:
use the menu solution BUT allow some special action keywords which if typed exactly could be used by experts.

like if you typed
*edit dylan

then it would really search for dylan (and not the *edit) string and when triggered it would use a special action edit instead of the default launch.

and user coul


actually this has some real strong appeal for one main reason,
it was basically the same approach we have suggested for handling the idea of search "modifiers", where you say that a certain keyword alters the search directories or scoring.

yes, this to me sounds like it may be the most satisfactory approach..

does everyone follow what i'm saying?

mouser:
an attempt to clarify what i mean.

right now we have what we call group aliases, which when they match what you type present a menu of choices (and the ability to use regex to grab some part of what you write to use in a command).

ok now

what if we generalized the group concept as follows:

lets do away with "group aliases" and just have the general concept of "keywords"

when you define a keyword you specify:
1) the keyword/name
2) optional overrides for search directories, file patterns, and scoring
3) the action to perform ('launch","delete", run some abitrary command, etc)
4) or instead of #2 you can specify a special some SPECIAL lists to be displayed in results window:
a) control panel applets
b) recent app list
c) a fixed list of items specified manually (this is would amount to current group alias funciton)
d) list of running processes
e) list of toplevel windows
f) a regular expression to match from editbox, combined with a fixed list of items
g) ... other possibilities


ok so

i might add a keyword called "*mp3"
which restricted the search directory to e:\My docs\Music
and gave high bonus score to *.mp3

or the keyword "email" which
used option f) to specify a regular expression to match "email (.*)" and then launch email client

or use keyword "*kill" which
with a 3) command the kills a running process.
used option d) to show a list of runing processes,
so when you type *kill scree.." it would be narrowing down the list of running processes to those that match "scree" and then when you select it it would KILL it.


or use keyword "cpanel" to work with option a) to show control panel applet list and launch on select.



opinions?

jgpaiva:
Mouser, i think you have found the perfect way! (i speccially like the *mp3 example you mentioned ;) )
I only have one small proposition:
How about if when you type the beggining of one of the "aliases", it would appear below, and you could press enter or tab, for it to complete, and then write your search?
eg:
  *k {enter/tab}
and the rest of the work *kill would appear, and you'd enter:
  screen {enter/tab}
and it would kill screenshot captor (if it was the first result, of course ;) )
Other than this, i think this might be the way to go!

ps: the aliases that act on a result, could have farr's icon instead of the folder icon, i think it'd be less confusing

Rover:
@mouser
Regarding the 2nd stage of action...

Would it be easier/good to have the default action attached to [Enter] and 2nd or optional actions tied to ... [tab], [ctrl-enter]?

Maybe you're beyond this line of thought now...

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