v1.07.02 beta - with regular expression commands

[nontroppo]

I maintain the Opera Wiki, where we have several hundred search plugins. As it was trivial to add, you can now spit out FARR format search strings from most of our plugins:

http://nontroppo.org...SearchPlugins?farr=1 (note the ?farr=1 enables the FARR link). Click on the "FARR" links after each plugin to see text to copy.

At the moment you are limited to SE7 (Opera native are the majority anyway) and not SRC (Mozilla) plugins, and you cannot for obvious reasons use POST type plugins. Just copy and paste the text into your FARR alias list.

BTW - this gives me an idea. Why not make a custom MIME type that calls up FARR with the URL chunk which then adds it to an alias list. This will allow click-and-run search plugins to be set up easily via the web (like we have for Opera). I'd be happy to host a custom FARR search plugin database; most of the code, and the search plugins are already there...

[mouser]

that is just too cool!!

ok i will look into making the custom mime thing as well as import+export functionality.

the import+export, as well as the mime thing, could benefit from letting each item be able to specify its group heading.

for example before i posted this group:

GROUPNAME: dictionary
REGEX: define (.*)
RESULTS:
Meriam Webster - $$1 |http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=$$1
Dictionary dot com - $$1 | http://dictionary.re...erence.com/search?q=$$1
Thesaurus dot com - $$1 | http://thesaurus.reference.com/search?q=$$1
Reference dot com - $$1 | http://www.reference.com/search?q=$$1
OED - $$1 | http://www.askoxford...dict&freesearch=$$1&branch=13842570&textsearchtype=exact
Dict dot org - $$1 | http://www.dict.org/...=Dict2&Database=*&Query=$$1
American Heritage - $$1 | http://www.bartleby....type=enty&query=$$1&db=ahd&Submit=Search

so maybe we need like a single line self contained thing:
dictionary | define (.*) | Meriam Webster - $$1 |http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=$$1

then when importing F&R will automatically know what groups to place each alias result into.

-

if its desired, i can add support for POST type url submissions.

[mouser]

nontroppo i'd love to make a categorized collection of these opera wiki plugins and provide them with F&R, with full credit to the wiki of course.

[nontroppo]

I'd be happy to give you the SQL dump, you'd need to parse it all though (you can then even parse the mozilla plugin format, I've just been lazy!). Saying that though, although I'm quite busy, maybe I can generate a "live" dump into whatever format FARR will end up importing. It would be easier as I know the SQL data structure and have code already there, I just need to loop through each value. I won't do that until we have a defined format for import / export.

How could you support POST - it seems impossible to do it in a browser neutral way...

The only problem with group definition within the plugin will be if users name their groups differently (due to i18n or whatever), you'd end up with lots of redundancy and fragmentation. Why not just bring up a group list when importing and let the user click. The only problem is the $$1 syntax - as I do I need it to be $$2 - maybe another setting in the import. Also, currently it seems unlikely you can set up group-item drag-n-drop or something to overcome it (need to rethink UI)...

[mouser]

what i would do with the POST is have a small f&r helper util submit the post date and just sent the resulting reply to be rendered in the browser of choice.  not too hard to do.

as for canonical F&R format, yeah i just realized that my proposed format is not good since | characters can be used in regular expressions, so some other kind of multicharacter separator would be needed.  maybe xml would be best.

as for different group names, well my thinking was that most of the time youll just want to be importing these links, and so all you really care about is that when you download a set of 40, they are pregrouped into 5 groups or so, which will be created on the fly, rather than have to manually sort each one.

[kfitting]

Will the new format lend itself to folder constraints?  (Sorry to belabor the point!)

Kevin

[Carol Haynes]

Mouser, why not just use a simple INI type format and parse it to merge into existing entries ?

[kfitting]

Sorry, I may be missing the boat on this entirely, but how would I make a group that would only return exe files?  I started with this:

Alias Name: exe
Regex: exe (.*)

Now what?  What "command" do I give it? I can type in a trial and it parses the way I think it should... I just don't where to go from there. I want it to look through all the folders and only display files that are exe.  Is this a misapplication of the whole alias principle?  This is a rather simple example, I'll admit, but I have other ideas for it once I get it working.  Thanks for any help,

Kevin

[Carol Haynes]

Why not just type it into the box - I don't think you need a rule to do this (or am I missing what you are trying to do).

If you want all .exe on your chosen paths just type *.exe after pressing break, or any other wildcard expression - so w*.exe will bring up all .exe file beginning with w.

[kfitting]

Kind of.... I hate typing punctuation (in fact, right now I have AutoHotKey adding apostrophe's for common contractions) so typing .exe after a name is kind of out.  However, the more useful application of this is for files at work.  All our project files begin with M880E.  i would like to make an alias that will filter based on that prefix without having to type it in everytime.  Still somewhat simplistic, I'll admit, but extremely useful... at least to me!  Thanks for the suggestion though,

Kevin

Let me also add that I would like to be able to type something like  "xls parts" and only have excel files with "parts" be returned in the search.  Basically, this is using alias' as a convienient shortcut since typing *parts*.xls takes longer and requires hitting shift and such.

Sorry, let me modify this again.  In essence, I am looking at alias' as a way to change settings on the fly.  Whether it be desired extensions or searched folders, I would like to be able to type an alias to change the behavior of the search function in FindRun.  I think other commands are useful (eg, internet, search, etc) but most useful (to me, mind!) is this changing of the search parameters.  Maybe this is not what these alias' are for.... that's fine!

[mouser]

kevin, what you are asking about will be implemented, but it isnt yey.
what you are talking about is what we have decided to call "modifiers".

the regular expression commands we are talking about now are just for alias groups, where you type in some expression and are shown a preset list of results.

[kfitting]

Ahhhhhh... I was beginning to get the feeling I was misunderstanding things!  And now, I'm feeling rather silly.  Maybe I can look at this again, without trying to force it to do something it isn't meant to, and finally understand it!  Thanks mouser,

Kevin

[mouser]

the terms are confusing, 'alias' does seem like it might refer to a word that could stand in for a search term.
maybe i should drop the term 'alias' and just refer to what we are talking about here as "GROUPS"

[nontroppo]

BTW, I think your suggestion of integrating NirCmd functionality as being excellent! In theory we can do that now no?

[mouser]

we absolutely can do all of the nircmd stuff right now using the existing alias commands/groups,
someone just needs to make some nice groups.