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Feature Request: Super Context...

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nontroppo:
First off FRR is excellent. I've been looking for something ever since I was blown away by seeing QuickSilver on a friends Mac.

Now, what makes QuickSilver utterly revolutionary is the context system. FFR has added support for the context menu, but it seems it needs to be clicked, thus making the purpose of a super-fast keyboard launcher not so fast or so "keyboard"!

This screenshot shows QuickSilver (QS) at work. The user has found a file, presses <tab> and can now search for contextual tasks to perform on that file. In this case move the file to another folder:
http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/images/screenshots/Bezel2.gif

Here, QS has found an Illustrator file, the user <tab>s to the actions field and chooses to email the file; on the Mac the address book entries then pop up!
http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/images/screenshots/Bezel6.gif

Now I don't believe we could get something quite so elegant on Windows, but even a more basic context system would make FRR unique and powerful in the Windows world.

I see two options for development. First is to somehow allow the contents of the windows context menu to be accessible by FRR. This puts the burden of the contextual items at Windows doorstep, FRR just packages those items in a keyboard driven search system as it does already. Does windows make this info available?

Second is to make some hard-coded "actions" and just present that list letting the history and scoring mechanisms of FRR to do the work. This could of course be made more elegant and smart as needed.

Of course the UI to present the contextual items needs to be thought out. I suppose splitting the results window in two panes and letting <tab> select the result pane item then move to the context pane would be fairly trivial to set up using the Windows UI elements. Of course QS has a Zen like elegance all to itself, but as long as functionality is there, the wonderful Zen aesthetics of QS can wait!

nontroppo:
Here are the various UI designs employed by QS — note all of them show the context action:

http://docs.blacktree.com/quicksilver/appearance

In this case the Preview application has been found and the default action (Launch) is displayed. Pressing tab would allow the conxtextual actions to be searched/modified.

kfitting:
Super Context is certainly intriguing... especially if more advanced groups are used to list files of a certain type etc.  It would be cool to just be able to hit tab and select from the normal windows context menu even.  The problem is, how do you select the file to expand the context menu for?  Since FindRun is also a program launcher, pressing a number should not bring up the context menu by default since then it would take more presses to launch programs.  But, interesting idea nonetheless, and with a little refining it could be made very powerful.

Kevin

nontroppo:
Well, one would probably need a default selection, so <tab> selects the entry with the highest points within current system FRR uses. I'd prefer to see some kind of autocomplete mechanism instead of the current seperate edit/results partitioned UI, and in that case this conundrum would disappear.

Of course one could simply use hotkeys - "2" launches the second result and "CTRL+2" accesses the context system for it. A setting in prefs could define what the default behaviour would be.

OK, how about this - can you measure how long a key is held down. This way a short press of "2" would launch and a long press of "2" would trigger the context actions!

mouser:
i'm kind of fond of the idea of taking advantage of ctrl+numberkey and alt+numberkey (maybe also winkey+numberkey).

the other question is more intriguing - what to show...

two main choices: 1) show regular shell context menu vs. 2) show a custom menu based on file extension.

if there is interest in #2, i could add another tab to the options dialog that let you specify custom commands associated with certain extentions.  so you could configure:
"*.txt":
edit file | c:\program files\ultraedit.exe $$1
print file | c:\program files\printfile.exe $$1

and then when user does a search, and finds a file they want, they would hit like Ctrl+1
which would then show this custom list in results view:
1. edit file
2. print file

where they could then hit 1 or 2.

the only problem is it is a bit confusing to use and would require configuration by user before it would work, whereas the context menu seems more logical, and is already premade.  maybe just ctrl+1 to bring up context menu for item 1 is the best solution.

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