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Author Topic: Portable suggestion  (Read 3320 times)

oblivion

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Portable suggestion
« on: July 30, 2013, 04:39 AM »
I was tweaking aliases in FARR when I thought of this but something similar might also be considered for LaunchBarCommander...

How about a tiny change to the logic that says, when you're adding an alias to a portable copy, via the “search for an executable” button, something like (very pseudo code)

if alias_executable_drive = %APPDRIVE% then replace alias_executable_drive with "%APPDRIVE%"

I get that there will be times when a hard-coded drive letter is a Good Thing, particularly when you’re running portably but expect to be able to find something on the host’s system, but I can’t think of a single instance where the drive letter of the portable device might need to be referred to explicitly rather than expanding the %APPDRIVE% variable instead. (Which might be a statement about my lack of imagination, I guess :) )

I'd also like to be able to ask FARR / LBC to search for all uses of a drive letter -- even if a search-and-replace option would be too much of a blunt instrument, a report I could work through just to make sure I hadn't missed anything stupid would be really useful :)

Partly, this is because I can go for several weeks without needing to remember how to refer to the drive letter variable and by the time I need it again, I’ve always forgotten it!
-- bests, Tim

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rjbull

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Re: Portable suggestion
« Reply #1 on: July 30, 2013, 05:44 PM »
Don't know if it helps, but take a look at Horst Schaeffer's ShortExe:
Windows insists that a shortcut target must have a fixed drive letter, which means you cannot use Windows shortcuts within a USB flash drive where the drive letter may change.

Here comes ShortExe.

The idea is to have a little program that you rename to something which will be interpreted (by the program itself) as shortcut information based on the actual drive letter.

oblivion

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Re: Portable suggestion
« Reply #2 on: July 31, 2013, 02:00 AM »
Don't know if it helps, but take a look at Horst Schaeffer's ShortExe:

Thanks -- one for the toolkit!

It's an interesting approach, but it's not a portablisation problem I have here: FARR already makes finding and running programs from portable media brilliantly easy. The issue is just, when you're configuring aliases (or shortcuts in LBC, as the logic's similar) the program defaults to using the drive letter instead of the completely available but apparently eminently forgettable %APPDRIVE% variable. So I was trying to suggest a tiny tweak whereby FARR / LBC could look to see if the drive letter and %APPDRIVE% match and, if they do, use the latter in the created shortcut / alias.

Just trying to save work for me and make some for mouser. Surely no harm in that, he whined, winningly. ;)
-- bests, Tim

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