zabkat support forum

here's the comment area for today's blog post fount at
http://zabkat.com/blog/xls-folders.htm

Thank you nikos for the update!

A new regexp library is used that is more PERL compatible, which means that more people can figure out how to write a useful regular expression

What exactly is "more PERL compatible"? From "almost PCRE" to "nearly PCRE"?

it's not PCRE, it is DEELX. I'm sure the regexp expert will bump in any minute with more clarifications!

I know that different regex libraries support the Perl syntax in different depth (which is why I mostly use Perl for text processing scripts). I was just wondering how "more PERL compatible" (than what?) works - "not compatible", "somewhat compatible", "more compatible", "almost compatible", we're all waiting for the next steps.

However, I must admit that I had never heard of DEELX before. Even the Wikipedia is not too expressive this time.

Nikos didn't like the PCRE library because it was too complex for his brain to figure out how to build, so he opted for the simpler DEELX (which works, but it's not ecclesiastical law, if you know what I mean). (In his favour, PCRE is not the simplest thing to build "out of the box" whereas DEELX is like Building for Dummies by comparison. See this project for precompiled static PCRE modules for those enlightened folks on MinGW.) For anyone interested, there's not a lot between the two API's either, so it's easy enough to interchange when testing.

Apparently the "old" libary that he was using was from ATL, which I couldn't stop complaining about as it didn't recognise any legitimate patterns. Outside of PCRE/DEELX there aren't a lot of practical choices for the discerning C coder, as even the (ridiculously bloated) engine included in the C++11-ISO standard is not Perl-friendly, which makes one wonder why they even bothered.

Anyway, I don't have any real complaints against DEELX other than it's a tad slower, out of dev, and may have questionable unicode compatibility (beyond wchar_t length) - none of which are too serious as the crow flies. In any event, it's a million times better than the ATL malarkey.

My Menuhack buttons stopped working. I checked and command numbers look the same. I've had this problem before with an update, but I don't remember how I fixed it.

I was wondering if there is a way to send keystrokes to x2 with a simple user command. I probably wouldn't even need Menuhack if I could.

Do any of the Regex improvements mean I can change case with the Mass rename command?

this is a script I use as a user command/toolbar button...

' http://www.devguru.com/technologies/wsh ... dKeys.html
set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
WshShell.SendKeys "^%{INSERT}"

this is the user command
>wscript D:\scripts\xplorer2\copy-tab.vbs

BTW, my MenuHack commands are working... do you keep MenuHack in the x2 install folder?

BTW, my MenuHack commands are working... do you keep MenuHack in the x2 install folder?

No, xplorer2 is 64 bit so it is in the Programs folder and the MenuHack folder is in Programs(x86) folder.

Edit a little later …
I've been using your VBS SendKeys scripting suggestion and fixing MenuHack may be no longer necessary. Thank you so very much.

I've always been amused Details and Thumbnails view have their own built in commands, but List and Mini thumbs do not. Next I'm fixing my Show All button.

pschroeter wrote:...fixing MenuHack may be no longer necessary.

As Frizzle pointed out, MenuHack continues to work just fine, so it's somewhat difficult to "fix" unless you can be more specific.

That said, just for the heck of it, I translated the original MenuHack from AutoIt into C for a 98.35% decrease in binary size. The functionality/syntax is exactly the same, but at just 15K (instead of 850K) it will load/execute much faster so any buttons you create should be more responsive. Naturally, the difference will be negligible for SSD users, but since everything from AV's to the shell itself sits there and studies an EXE before running the bloody thing, "every little helps".

For anyone interested in trying it, or just looking at the code to see how all "sendkey"-variants actually work on the API level (from VBS to AutoIt to AHK it's all the same underneath), have a look: MenuHack1301

(Note: There may be some small timing-issues with "CTRL"-style command modifiers, so if anyone encounters any niggles let me know. Despite using the API, this stuff [as usual] is less precise than one might think.)

pschroeter wrote:Do any of the Regex improvements mean I can change case with the Mass rename command?

Considering RegEx is still disabled in the rename modal, that would be a "No". While changing case is possible in RegEx proper (using match/back references) it's somewhat obscure syntax for normal people to play with on a regular basis... so, as they say, there's got to be an easier way for Nikos to get to Marrakech.

I replaced the AutoIt MenuHack with the new C one and the buttons I've tried have worked fine... I don't have any using key modifiers but I'll set one up to check it out...

Thanks for trying it out. I regularly use "Force Copy/Move Opposite" commands (32793 CTRL and 32794 CTRL respectively) and the options modal kept opening on me, so I was forced to add a 150 millisecond delay between keydown and the SendMessage, which seems to keep the Windows input stream happy, but I could never figure out if that was because the message queue itself was being processed too fast or too slow for them to sync (the input and message queues seem to be separate entities in Win32). It only comes into play on modified-commands.

Kilmatead wrote:

pschroeter wrote:...fixing MenuHack may be no longer necessary.

As Frizzle pointed out, MenuHack continues to work just fine, so it's somewhat difficult to "fix" unless you can be more specific.

All I knew was after upgrading x2 to version 3.2 , all my user command buttons that link to MenuHack stopped working. This has happened before occasionally over the years and sometime I had to do something to get it working again.

Since the gawds like to laugh at my efforts, I found that after I had created VBS SendKey scripts to recreate my List view, Mini thumbs, and Show all buttons, I searched and searched and found there is no keyboard command for showing the Address bar, which MenuHack can activate. I downloaded and replaced my old MenuHack with your new C+ MenuHackMini version and it now works again! Thank you so very much. Now I'm trying to decide if there is any advantage to switching my user commands back to MenuHack(Mini) from VBS.

pschroeter wrote:I downloaded and replaced my old MenuHack with your new C+ MenuHackMini version and it now works again!

I cannot explain why you may have had problems with the original version - it's always worked the same way (there was a problem a few years back when switching to x2 version 2 because of how it anticipated the active window, but that was easily solved, and it's been happy ever since.

(And , just to be whimsically pedantic, it's "C", it's not "C+" or "++" or anything else. C++ is evil. Evil, I say! Plain C is good. It's the smell of freshly baked bread; it's the glint in a maiden's eye as she smiles in a wistful pirouette... it just represents all that is fine and fair in the world. On the other hand, C++ is the spawn of the devil; it is the dead and burnt husk of all that is terrible and cruel. It is the Donald Trump of languages. Ok, maybe that's a little mean - C# is the Trump of languages, C++ is merely the lesser of two evils. )

pschroeter, how old was your MenuHack executable?

Mine is version 1.2.0.0 which is dated Dec 7, 2011. (Released by Kilmatead here)

I remember having problems with the older version of MH not working after upgrading x2.