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v6.40.0010 - 2007-10-20 21:57
+++ Another milestone on the long and winding road to superior
productivity and file management fun: User-Defined Commands (UDC)!
Contrary to my original plans (then called "Scriptable Hotkeys") I
did not implement them key-based but menu-based. It took me half a
year to make up my mind about this, but it was worth every second
of it. What you get now is 100% full control, plus total visual
feedback, full mouse and key access, and the possibility to have
user-defined commands *without* an assigned keyboard shortcut (which
was one of the inherent drawbacks of the key-based approach). Of
course, the real power of UDCs start when you *do* assign KSs to
them... :)
You find a new top menu called "User", containing a link to
the interface where you manage your commands, and three command
categories (I'll soon add more, don't worry...). I attempted to
make it as intuitive as possible. Step by step:
- Open the Manage Commands interface
- Select a Category
- Press "New"
- Enter the "Argument": that's the critical piece of data. It's
where you specify the object of the Action. Usually it will be
a file or folder, so there's a Browse button to the right of
the edit field.
- Optionally enter the Caption (for the menu item). If left
empty, the Argument will be used for the caption.
- Press Apply to add your edited command to the Commands list.
- Repeat for all UDCs you need.
- Finally press OK to apply your changes to the current session
of XYplorer. The new menus will be generated in a blink. Open
the User menu and see yourself...
- Now you can open CKS and assign KSs to your new UDCs.
- Of course, as always in XY, the UDCs will be saved to file on
exit unless otherwise wanted. This file is called udc.dat.
Further remarks:
- There's virtually no limit to the number of commands, although,
being menu-based and having a finite number of keys on your board
you will hit a usability wall at some point.
- The files udc.dat and ks.dat are independent from each other
which has obvious advantages: e.g., you can easily switch and
share data sets between parallel XY instances or XY users.
Just keep in mind one thing: the keyboard shortcuts in ks.dat
identify functions by numbers and will trigger them without
asking questions. So, if you throw a udc.dat together with a
ks.dat that origin from different XY instances, the UDC-
referring keyboard shortcuts will, of course, trigger whatever
they find in that udc.dat. So, when loading a new udc.dat or a
new ks.dat, quickly have a look at your "User" menu and see how
the KS<->UDC situation has changed.
- I took the chance to open the door to one of the next big
XY features: scriptability! Internally the UDCs are already
processed as scripts.
% Number formatting faster. You won't note it with today's hardware
speed but believe me, it is faster. :)
+ Added accelerators to menus that are listing tabs. Here's an
example ("&" marks next char as accelerators; "&&" stands for "&"
char that's not marking an accelerator):
0&1 - Desktop
0&2 - Desktop\getclipboard && files
0&3 - C:\
0&4 - D:\Download