deskrule 1106 beta

Discussion & Support for xplorer² professional

Moderators: fgagnon, nikos, Site Mods

Enternal
Member
Member
Posts: 54
Joined: 2013 Aug 03, 05:28

Re: deskrule 1106 beta

Post by Enternal »

Let say you are searching for content "testing". There are multiple instancees of "testing" within one of the file that DeskRule found. Is there a way for thee preview pane to jump/highlight from one instance of "testing" in a file to another instance of "testing" in the same file? I know that it would bold all instances of "testing" but that's not as helpful when you have a large text file for example.
Kilmatead
Platinum Member
Platinum Member
Posts: 4573
Joined: 2008 Sep 30, 06:52
Location: Dublin

Re: deskrule 1106 beta

Post by Kilmatead »

nikos wrote:put all wildcards and regex in 'single quotes'
How quaint. That's about as intuitive as the deltas in nuclear decay rates. But at least it does work - what's so wrong about just using traditional escape sequences?

(And where you say "Many of the special characters that appear in regular expressions could be mistakened for arithmetic operators", you should be aware that "mistakened" is not actually a real word in any language. Just sayin')
Enternal wrote:Is there a way for thee preview pane to jump/highlight from one instance of "testing" in a file to another instance of "testing" in the same file?
When the focus is in the preview, pressing <F3> cycles through occurrences.
Enternal
Member
Member
Posts: 54
Joined: 2013 Aug 03, 05:28

Re: deskrule 1106 beta

Post by Enternal »

Oh right! Just like the registry editor duh. Thanks!
Kilmatead
Platinum Member
Platinum Member
Posts: 4573
Joined: 2008 Sep 30, 06:52
Location: Dublin

Re: deskrule 1106 beta

Post by Kilmatead »

Enternal wrote:Just like the registry editor
Umm... I'll refrain from saying that <F3> is the standard "find next" key for every editor ever created since the history of forever. Take any text editor, search for a string, and you'll probably find that <F3> will repeat the token search from the last location forward to the next. I've never seen a text editor, IDE, word processor, or hitchiking girl in a skimpy halter-top that didn't conform to that paradigm. :shock:

Once in a blue moon Nikos does actually bow to convention. He hates himself for it in the morning though, but it's all part of learning how to cross the street by himself. That's why he made <Ctrl+R> "Refresh" in x2, because he just couldn't bring himself to use <F5> like he should have in accordance with the Universal Ergonomic Species Act of 1973, and he's been a hunted man ever since. An interesting life, has had our Nikos, hiding in brothels, using people-trafficking skills to cross borders, picking Christmas Trees for cover so scrawny as to make a robin screech in pain. It all changed when he finally saw the Bourne Identity and got his act together, but that's a different story... :shrug:
User avatar
drac
Bronze Member
Bronze Member
Posts: 145
Joined: 2013 Jan 08, 00:14

Re: deskrule 1106 beta

Post by drac »

Kilmatead,

While you did say "text editor" and technically WordStar is a word processor - one of the first and arguably THE best of breed in either category, WordStar did NOT use F3. Back in the day when the intelligence required to use a computer resided on the human side, unlike today where most of the intelligence is on the computer side, programs like WordStar ruled. And that should not be confused with deskrule which is, at least according to you, not quite ready to rule.
Kilmatead
Platinum Member
Platinum Member
Posts: 4573
Joined: 2008 Sep 30, 06:52
Location: Dublin

Re: deskrule 1106 beta

Post by Kilmatead »

Always being a Sprint man myself (and would be to this day if the fools hadn't stopped making it), I was never ensconced in the Wordstar mindset. Though we do note that Wordstar was developed under CP/M originally, and merely ported to DOS later, which might explain why its shortcuts didn't conform to any of Redmond's wishes. :D

That said, I can't recall a single keyboard-shortcut from that era, which suggests that (in typical youthful fashion) I was more absorbed with what I was doing rather than how I was doing it. Children are like that - ask them which video-game controller button is used to shoot the bumbling Nazi's and they can't tell you off the top of their head - yet place an actual controller in their grubby little hands and it all becomes second-nature to them as if encoded in their DNA with a priority higher than the immune system itself.

To be fair, I do recall that the original Borland IDE's (Pascal and latterly, C) used <F9> for Compile, and was mightily gratified 30 years later to see that that selfsame key is still the de-facto compile-key for almost all IDE's today. It's the little things in life that make me happy. :wink:

Of course, all that came to a head in university where (never having learned to type properly) I was always a good source of entertainment for people in the VAX lab who watched me type with 3 or 4 fingers faster than they could imagine possible. Obscurely, I still do it that way to this day - if I ever develop carpel-tunnel it will be wholly from the middle and radial fingers - none other. I always considered it some kind of irony that I use a ridiculous keyboard now, seeing that I can't ever imagine using more than 3 fingers at most, and all function keys still seem like a far off land to me, being way beyond the familiar pale of my lazy palmrest. :D
Enternal
Member
Member
Posts: 54
Joined: 2013 Aug 03, 05:28

Re: deskrule 1106 beta

Post by Enternal »

Wow so I have mixed feelings now. I never paid attention so I did not know that F3 was a standard "Go to next search result". I just tried it out in my favorite editors and voila! So the only experience I ever got with F3 doing that was with the registry editor. I guess that just makes my whole post "unique" and "fresh" right? For whenever I think of F3's "Go to next search result", I think of Windows Registry Editor. That's too cool. *cough* *cough*

Yeah I was surprised that xplorer2 uses <Ctrl+R> for "Refresh". Because that's more typical of web browsers and not file managers. All file managers I used so far (oh boy do I love playing with file managers) has F5 for "Refresh", just like Windows. All web browsers I know of users <Ctrl+R> for "Refresh". Talk about oddness when I first played with xplorer2 years ago.

Anyways... Merry Christmas everyone! Unless everyone else is in EU or elsehwere... Sorry I'm late.
User avatar
drac
Bronze Member
Bronze Member
Posts: 145
Joined: 2013 Jan 08, 00:14

Re: deskrule 1106 beta

Post by drac »

Kilmatead,

Having taken a typing class in high school, I could type with all 10 fingers by the time I discovered computers. But I did have many colleagues who, like you, used fewer digits than God supplied. And, like you, their speed was amazing. It mirrored the competition on early minicomputers between complex instruction sets and simple instruction sets. One camp championed having many complex and powerful instructions to handle tasks normally needed by programmers. The other group believed that fewer, basic, instructions, that could be combined to do anything the programmer wanted was more efficient in both speed and hardware. I preferred the former philosophy which eventually prevailed.

I do not remember all the WordStar commands, and there were a LOT of them. But at my prime I could edit a line of text jumping forward, backward, inserting, deleting, changing characters - all without seeing what I was doing outside of the picture in my mind, because the now ubiquitous WYSIWYG presentation style did not exist. You could display the current line, make changes, and display it again to see what it looked like after the changes (whether you got them all and did them correctly). Like I said, the intelligence was in the user, not the computer. Actually seeing what you are doing as you do it is a crutch for the weak mind - much like watching a play on TV versus listening to it acted out over the radio. In the later case, ones imagination created the set, the characters and the action. There is a reason it was/is called the idiot box (the TV, that is).
dunno
Gold Member
Gold Member
Posts: 506
Joined: 2007 Nov 18, 03:00
Location: Tropical Hammock

Re: deskrule 1106 beta

Post by dunno »

drac wrote: But at my prime I could edit a line of text jumping forward, backward, inserting, deleting, changing characters - all without seeing what I was doing outside of the picture in my mind, because the now ubiquitous WYSIWYG presentation style did not exist.
Stone Tablets, Paper, Type Writers, all predate PC's, aren't they WYSIWYG ?....
Ah yes, anyone that prefers to see results of actions as they create, (known as visual feedback), is what, inferior ?, I'm trying to determine if you're really that uninformed re- human behaviour. I would love to see you edit a photo in photo shop without layers, go on do it all in your mind.
drac wrote: Like I said, the intelligence was in the user, not the computer. Actually seeing what you are doing as you do it is a crutch for the weak mind
Do you realise how intellectually arrogant that sounds.
I've got news for you, Everything is created in the mind, have you ever tried writing a book ?. A word processor enables one to edit ideas and words without wasting tons of paper and time, visual feedback is essential for humans, irrespective of intelligence or "strong minds".

drac wrote: - much like watching a play on TV versus listening to it acted out over the radio. In the later case, ones imagination created the set, the characters and the action.
Have you ever read a script for a theatrical play ?, if you had you'd know that radio does no justice to any play at all for the minds eye CANNOT visualise what the playright intended with positioning of the actors, facial expressions, body postures, make up, costumes, or, any multitude of visual and ambient ques which enhances the play, all without words, a play over radio is no-where the same as the same play in a theater.
User avatar
drac
Bronze Member
Bronze Member
Posts: 145
Joined: 2013 Jan 08, 00:14

Re: deskrule 1106 beta

Post by drac »

I would love to watch you edit text written on a stone tablet! Even changing text on paper is far from simple. I am NOT saying WYSIWYG is a bad thing. But I AM saying it makes it possible for the intellectually inferior to participate in the computer phenomenon. I will not got started about all the ills caused by people that do not have the intelligence to create software, but have that job because of transfer of intelligence from people to computers.

And YES, I AM being intellectually arrogant! Maybe not as elegantly has Kilmatead could, but my point is that if the programming of computers were left to people who could visualize and edit a line of text in their head, our computers would not be so vulnerable to hacking. Social hacking - tricking users into doing stupid things, is still a major pathway for hackers to gain access to computers. I know how to fix many of the vulnerabilities that currently plague our vast computer networks. I also know how to prevent hackers and spammers from hiding via spoofing. These are NOT difficult things to do - they just require some forethought and discipline. But the lowering of the intelligence level needed to program computers has reduced the amount of thought - and forethought that goes into designing complex systems.

Have you ever laid in bed on a Saturday morning, as a kid, and listed to a radio program telling a story? It makes no difference what a playwright has in mind, it is what the LISTENER has in mind. This is about imagination, this is what a book does - not a comic book (excuse me, "graphic novel") but a book that uses words to paint pictures which each reader creates in their own mind based on their own life experiences. A movie is easy to watch, the director has removed all need for imagination. It is the easy, dumbed down, version of the book and the vision we see is that of the producer, director and others involved with the film. For many, that may be WAY better than what any one of us could have imagined, but some people reading the book, may have come up with a far more entertaining story.
Kilmatead
Platinum Member
Platinum Member
Posts: 4573
Joined: 2008 Sep 30, 06:52
Location: Dublin

Re: deskrule 1106 beta

Post by Kilmatead »

drac wrote:...the lowering of the intelligence level needed to program computers has reduced the amount of thought - and forethought that goes into designing complex systems.
Tell that to the OpenSSL lads back in July. :wink:

Personally, I'm more suspicious of how people are learning this stuff, rather than any intelligence quotient trade-off. Since my re-conversion back into the fold of C, I've been following (just for fun) the question-forums on StackOverflow, and the number of users whose blatant queries were meant to be homework from a class (which, weirdly, are actually answered by other users when they should just be ignored) is legion.

Back when I was learning C (or programming as a whole) there wasn't any internet, and my grade-school found it hard enough to find a teacher who could pass a BASIC exam never mind a real language, so I learned it on my own with a seriously dog-eared copy of Kernighan-&-Ritchie and a compiler by myself. Even my friends weren't interested, so for years it was just me, in my room, with no one to ask for help. If I got stuck, I dug myself out.

Now, however, it seems rather hip to "learn" programming by watching videos (as if passive-learning were even possible), and ask completely inane questions of others which any simple language-primer could answer - no one seems to even try and figure things out on their own any more. What's wrong with these kids? It's now multi-generations which have "cried wolf" and are in no shape to help anybody much less themselves...

My faith, however, is occasionally recompensed by posts such as this where someone asked a legitimately interesting question and if you scroll down to the "Answers" part, your man wrote a 7-paragraph stint about optimising the assembler that would make Bambi cry from shame. Amazing.

Interestingly enough, if you tally the good from the wastrels, there's little doubt that the intelligentsia are clearly all specialised on Linux, while the chaff congregate (predictably, where the money is) on Windows or (worse) Mac. I suppose this has always been the way (user-numbers vs accessibility) but add in the degradation of users who aren't interested in learning having the internet available at will (or worse, turning to "dot-NET")... and there's a serious gulf of cognitivism between what learning once was (Socrates and self-reliant reasoning in problem solving), and what passes for (apparently) "hopeful osmosis" now. :shrug:

All that being said though, I've been a professional pessimist since I was 3 and realised that grown-ups were all idiots, so such a state of affairs does not surprise me. Nor do I mourn it much, being deniably Nietzschean by way of Schopenhauer. (In essence, by its nature the universe itself is irrational - silly humans can only appreciate the detritus at best, and even then only through the sharp veil of an ephemeral and syphilitic lack of hope. If you're really lucky, you might get a lollipop along the way, and your son-in-law won't turn out to be too much of a schmuck. But don't count it.)
User avatar
drac
Bronze Member
Bronze Member
Posts: 145
Joined: 2013 Jan 08, 00:14

Re: deskrule 1106 beta

Post by drac »

Kilmatead,

Mentioning C and “a real language” in the same sentence suggests a lack of programming prowess. There is only ONE “real” language and that is machine code (assembler). Any high level language (and that is what C is) cannot be termed a “real” language. Sure, programming snobs may look down on BASIC and other such “simple” languages, but that is how C is viewed by “real” programmers. I once wrote a “load and go” compiler that was similar to Fortran. I just did it for fun, but it was used by people in my department to do research into sonar signal processing because the little computer it ran on was available to people in our department while the “big” systems were used company-wide (company=Univac) and were more difficult to get time on. Of course this complier was written in assembler. Load and go means that you loaded my program, which then read the high level language code, converted it to machine code, stored this into memory, then executed the converted code. This was all done on a computer with 4K words (not bytes, these words were 18 bit). There was NO other storage - just paper tape as the input device, 4K of RAM, and paper tape or a FlexWriter (think Teletype machine) for output. Good luck trying to do that on any of today’s computers with those resources using C!

Having said all that, I don’t think the programming language makes that much of a difference. If you are a programming genius, any media will do. Monet could create beauty with watercolor, oils, probably even colored chalk. Mozart created beautiful music on many instruments. I think programming is about techniques - the programming language can help or hinder the development of applications, but even a great language is not going to help a clueless developer create secure, efficient, inspired code. Books (anything by Don Knuth, and a few others) that teach techniques and are not language specific, provide the concepts that are the the basis of good programs.

I do not agree that the intelligentsia specialize on Linux. I think the computer nerds congregate around Linux. But genius can be found on all platforms. The problems with Windows and Mac OS is that they have to be all things to all people. It is hard to create an amazing application on a flawed platform. The larger the number of people involved in creating an application, the less likely that it will be flawless and technically groundbreaking Linus is an exception because it allows open access - as opposed to only people employed to work on a project. Why is malware, as a category, so elegant? Because most is written by one (or a small group) of loners who are super smart but antisocial (as many geniuses seem to be - myself included :-) ).

I don’t like lollipops any more, but a good pork chop is a treat. And my son-in-law is a nice guy, so maybe I lucked out there.

Good talking to you again, it has been a while.
RightPaddock
Gold Member
Gold Member
Posts: 428
Joined: 2011 Jan 23, 18:58
Location: Sydney AU

Re: deskrule 1106 beta

Post by RightPaddock »

drac - I recall hours of delight watching high speed paper tape output spewing into large dirty linen baskets. Then winding the paper tape onto reels, and using flexowriters to print the results. It was simulations written in KDF9 and Ferranti Sirius Autocoder. Then TPTB decreed we had to get rid of the KDF9s and Siriuses and use their IBM 360s. We wrote a KDF 9 emulator for the 360, part of which accelerated its real time clock -- oops their payroll jobs fell over. We eventually smuggled a PDP8 into the lab and did our simulations on it - it had paper tape i/o and a couple of Dectapes (random access mag tape).

Our politicians keep talking about kids needing to learn 'coding' - I cringe whenever they say it.

Not sure about Monet and chalk, but I believe Degas did works with crayon, Hockney uses his iPhone. When I can't sleep I listen to radio book readings and plays. Most recently the Beeb's reading of Zola's Blood, Sex and Money series. Radio has an intimacy that TV, video, and film can never achieve - nor for that matter a book.

I have an apropos expression for you -"If you can't imagine, then you probably can't think". And I hate almost all instructional videos - I suspect there's one on how to unbox cornflakes.

BR
Windows 10 Pro (64 bit) version 1809 - Xplorer2 version: Pro 2.5.0.4 [Unicode] x64 2014-06-21
Kilmatead
Platinum Member
Platinum Member
Posts: 4573
Joined: 2008 Sep 30, 06:52
Location: Dublin

Re: deskrule 1106 beta

Post by Kilmatead »

drac wrote:Any high level language (and that is what C is) cannot be termed a “real” language.
A tad pompous, but relatively true :wink:, yet C is the lowest of the so-called "high level" languages in use today, and the assembly the compiler produces can actually be accurately predicted (sans optimisations) by an astute programmer directly from C source, whereas no one can predict what even a C++ programme will actually boil down to with any accuracy due to its intrinsic bloat. And pretty much all other "high level" languages (these days) are so abstracted into OOP navel-gazing that they become meaningless in reduction. Most are scripting anyway, running as bytecode/pseudocode, not even proper assembly.

No one in their right mind would use pure assembly in systems-programming these days (the scale is too proportionally divergent), so singing its praises eventually falls on deaf ears by the simple laws of gravity. However, for nitpicking (and sustaining) one's way through the underlying framework it has its place. The year I was able to spend on a PDP-11 (via DecWriter) when I was 13 was quite educational, and I jammed as much as I could of how jobs were allocated under a concurrent environment into my brain... at the time there was nothing else like it for a kid to play with. (Forcing dumps, just so I could take the reams home to read, etc.)
drac wrote:Good luck trying to do that on any of today’s computers with those resources using C!
That's actually what C is for now - since (as above) the resultant assembly can be predicted (unlike other languages), plus a little inline asm tweaking here or there, it's accurate (and tight enough) for what passes as BIOS writing these days (UEFI), firmware, and low-level drivers; though in the raw it's still assembly, or severely distilled C.
drac wrote:Monet could create beauty with watercolor, oils, probably even colored chalk. Mozart created beautiful music on many instruments.
Yes, and Picasso played with silly-string, and Miles Davis used a plastic trumpet from time to time. But none of it contained the real pathos that beauty requires to transcend itself. That's what impressionism thrives on, transmuting the base contemporary (i.e. the "familliar" of an epoch) into its Jungian 'Shadow' (for lack of a darker association). And it's also what inevitably leads to beauty's passing, for it has no substance, the innocence of a moment lost to pain. Mozart, similarly, was just a populist who wrote nothing of any real value except the terrific death chords of Don Giovanni (as truncated properly by Mahler), and the reputed transcoding of the Miserere (Allegri). Other than that he couldn't write a piece of chamber music even close to the weakest of Haydn's coughing, never mind approaching that master's Seven Last Words. Very good at what he did, but he was a stylist, not an innovator. Besides, having a taste for scatological humour rather disqualifies one from the respect-o-club in my book. :D
drac wrote:I do not agree that the intelligentsia specialize on Linux. I think the computer nerds congregate around Linux. But genius can be found on all platforms.
Not quite what I meant - computer nerds congregate everywhere, Linux however gives them the absolute freedom (and confidence) to work (and destroy) without repercussion. Working on Windows always seems to come off as people "compensating" (even in their own words), rather than innovating. It comes across in the famous banality of Torvalds - inarticulate and unproofed, but Windows and Mac coding can't give anyone the uncouth swagger of dirt on his face. It's sterile that way, and always has been.
drac wrote:Why is malware, as a category, so elegant?
Minimalism. Nothing to do with the supposed élan of authorship. That's why Philip Glass is so closely identified with the late Beethoven quartets, his populist minimalism was presaged as a few throwaway bars a few hundred years before, and (the real) grunts like Schoenberg and Weber just "didn't get it", because they reduced it too far to be of any real use, and are properly forgotten today. Malware can be elegant for the simple purity of its purpose balanced with the confines of its delivery: other 'ware variants are too entrenched to be truly freeform. I always disassociate authors from their works, and the same is true for code: the vulgarity of anonymous sex combined with the intimacy of confinement always leads to either innovation or madness - and the best part is that contemporary audiences of the mesmerised can't tell which is which, providing the perfect target. :D

As it should be.
RightPaddock wrote:And I hate almost all instructional videos - I suspect there's one on how to unbox cornflakes.
Maybe it's just a generational thing - kids seem to like it. I doubt they're actually learning anything, of course, but as a "sensory delivery system" videos seem to float their boat. :shrug: Rubbish to everyone else though. ("Sensory delivery" is not to be confused with "Content delivery", to put it into more contemporary parlance.)
dunno
Gold Member
Gold Member
Posts: 506
Joined: 2007 Nov 18, 03:00
Location: Tropical Hammock

Re: deskrule 1106 beta

Post by dunno »

I think that my skills as a brick layer, plumber, milwright, and Aviation technician are going to be worth a premium, I'm going to fleece you guys :-) and no I don't need C or ASM to do a engine change on 747.

Instructional videos are worthwhile, its easy to "look and do". Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. Not all minds work alike, minds differ and information is processed and retained in many ways. I think you guys are full of hubris with your prowess at being "ABLE TO CODE", the world is not made up of coders, get out and smell the shit, sorry I meant roses.
Post Reply