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farr v2 planning - use cases and action idea

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jukla:
Mouser,

Ok, I see the problem now.

"and let users have two keyboards so they can type in both at the same time and restrict results in both windows."

Let them have four hands too  ;D

One could perhaps handle the problem with FARR interpreting misspelled action modifiers as regular search terms by demanding some unusual prefix letter before all actions. Alternatively, when pressing some hotkey, FARR interprets the next term as an ACTION specification (and highlights the term to show that the hotkey worked)
A downside is that users must press an extra letter/hotkey.

With risk of repetition, another solution is to sidestep the problem more generally by letting users specify actions and/or filters for file-types or certain folders through hotkeys alone. (Yep, I'm turning more and more into a hotkey fanatic)

GOOD THINGS WITH HOTKEYS:
- Hotkeys have less ambiguities - either you press the right one or you don't.
- When known, hotkeys are faster than typing.

BAD THINGS WITH HOTKEYS:
- Users may fail to memorize them, making them slower AND frustrating.

But that can be handled by some hotkey help displayed in the GUI, like the L i illustrated or like how Adobe Photoshop shows alternative actions in the taskbar when for example CTRL is held down.

- There's tension between uncomplicated hotkeys and having many alternative actions/filters to choose from. Handling the latter through hotkeys necessitates more complexity. Which take more time and more effort to remember.

But I think a good trade-off would be to
(1) to (as said before) guide the hotkeys through help in the GUI and
(2) limit them to one- or two-key-combos. For example: simple hotkeys = one of CTRL/ALT/SHIFT. More complex hotkeys = simple hotkey + another key (perhaps right SHIFT can be used for that?). That give's six modes in addition to default. Wouldn't that cover most usage for most users?  :tellme: The rest could be handled via context menu.

Also, if the hotkeys are given different usage for when the search field is in focus (call them search modifying hotkeys) and results list is in focus (call them action specifying hotkeys) we get six file/folder filter modes and six action modes from only four keys (in addition to the default modes).

jgpaiva:
@jukla:
I'm not much for hotkeys, let me explain you why:
hotkeys are counter-intuitive, someone that uses the program for the first time, doesn't know them.
hotkeys aren't dynamic, you have to set them up
hotkeys are limited, which means that you'd only have a bunch of actions
lots of people have several hotkeys set in their system, that might conflict.

The rest could be handled via context menu.-jukla (May 19, 2006, 04:53 AM)
--- End quote ---
That's the thing here, right now, we can play mp3 files through the contex menu, what we'd like would be to be able to not use it, just have that action predefined.

I just came up with this idea: (which has been already proposed in a similar way)
as farr will have indexing, at the time of creation of this index, when evaluating each of the files, it could see what the right-click context menu allows to do with that file (this is the hard part, i think), and generate a bunch of actions, each of them with a every file that can have that action.
then, we'd only type the action (and the blank list would include files and alias), and when it had a match, we press [enter]/#/whatever, and then, search for the file we want to apply that action to.

The limitation of the above is that we can only have actions applied to single files, but it'd have the good thing that, just as it is now, farr wouln't need any configuration to have it's full functionality.

To complete this system, there could be a way to set alias that would take more than one file, and would know what to do with them (example: move "from" "to").

mouser:
One could perhaps handle the problem with FARR interpreting misspelled action modifiers as regular search terms by demanding some unusual prefix letter before all actions.
--- End quote ---


this is an interesting possibility.. it has been raised before but i always though, ok let the user create their own regex aliases with a special prefix if they want but don't force it.

however, if we said that all actions start with some character (say $ or ` or  . or whatever), then that might solve the core of this dilimena, in that anytime a word starts with $ then farr knows the users is specifying a modifier or action and it would NOT be involved in narrowing down file names (except to the extend that it matches a modiifer name).

then we could have action searching either in the results window temporarily, or in a separate window or edit field.

so for example, revisiting my example above, if you type "bob dyl" and then you've got 3 results of bob dylan songs, you could then type
'bob dyl +tagedit"

and then hit enter for #1, farr will know you want to perform the tagedit operation on file result #1.

furthermore it would let you type
"+play bo"

and +play would act both as a modifier restricting search to mp3 files and as an action specifier for when you hit enter.

you could also use it as a pure modier like "+mydocs bob dy"

the other nice thing about having a special character for actions is it lets farr HELP YOU when you start typing a modifier
so that when you type "+m" it could remind you of matching modifiers as a hint.
it could do that EITHER by temporarily changing the results list to a list of matching modifiers/actions, which you could select by number,
OR it could use a secondary results box of available actions (same input field different results box), or it could insist you always fully type out a modifier but give you a little hint about matching modifiers/actions in some little box somewhere, OR it could provide some kind of autocomplete.

at this very moment im feeling like this might offer the key solution to letting us move forward on this.. there would still be some hard decisions about user interface but i think this might solve the core of the use case dilemna i have been struggling with.

-

i tend to agree with jgpaiva in terms of hotkeys; some people love them - i personally can NEVER remember any, so they just drive me crazy.  i like that farr is meant to let users just start typing and not have to remember anything.

having said that, i like the idea of being able to allow experts to specify hotkeys for any modifiers/actions, but it should be optional and not central to use.

mouser:
i really would like to hear some thoughts from nontroppo and others involved in past farr v2 planning discussions.

jdmarch:
I appreciate that this  topic is being clarified. Unfortunately I won't be able to attend to it until mid-June.

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