Another beginner chimes in...

[JamieG]

As a preliminary note, I sent this to nikos by email last month. Having subsequently discovered these forums, I realize it should have been posted here. So after a few editing changes, here it is and nikos can skip my email when he returns.

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I've been using xplorer2 for a month or so and I like it very much. It's hard to change habits and I still find myself inadvertantly opening Explorer from time to time, but ever less frequently. xplorer2 is a fine program with truly excellent documentation (the time spent making the doc is apparent). I'm very pleased to have bought the license.

I imagine it will take months before I've really found all the features, but here are some first impressions and a few suggestions.


1. Filtered panes

From time to time I get confused because I forget I'm looking at a filtered pane. The funnel icon is cute but, for my eyes at least, it gets lost amid the general clutter of the xplorer2 workspace.

Might it not be more effective simply to change the background color of a pane when it's filtered? I don't think it would conflict with any other program features and it would certainly stand out. In the Program Options window, you'd have to allow specifying 2 more colors: active-filtered and inactive-filtered.


2. Keyboard shortcuts

I'm happiest when I can do as much as possible without having to reach for the mouse, especially for repetitive operations. (The xplorer2 developers must be like that too otherwise they wouldn't have spent so much time implementing the million-plus keyboard shortcuts in the program!)

It'd be nice if there were a synopsis of the shortcuts under the Help menu since it's hard work getting at them in the PDF documentation.


3. Preselection of only the basename on a rename

When renaming files, I very much like xplorer2's preselection of just the basename (i.e. not preselecting the dot or the extension). It's an intelligent user interface feature. I'd like it even more if:

(a) it didn't apply to directories. Directory names on my system normally have dots in them, but what follows (usually a YYMMDD date) is definitely NOT an extension to avoid deleting by accident. Since directory names don't imply or invoke system behavior in the same way as for example ".xls" does for a file, there's no point in preselecting just a part of the directory name when one hits the <F2> key.

(b) if the up- and down- keys cancelled the preselection and left the cursor where it was (positioned just before the "."). Up- and down- mimick left- and right-, cancelling the preselction and moving the cursor by one byte. Often when I rename a file, however, I want to add something just before the ".". As the arrow keys currently work, I have to hit two of them (ex. left- then right- to come back to the dot) when just one might have sufficed.


4. REs (Regular expressions) for selecting files... and more

I'm far from having come to grips with all the different file selection features of xplorer2. Basically I limit myself to simple filename masks, frequently doing batch renames on the result. I'm a perl programmer, however, and I am used to doing nearly everything with regular expressions. I find it laborious being limited to the traditional filename wildcards (* and ?).

In particular, I use a file marking system which is ill-suited to the visual filter facilities. I mark files by appending "+" or "-" to the basename and I can't figure out a filter syntax or rule which will select those files. (I can't put "[-+]" in the "Named" box for a simple filter because Unix shell-style "[]" syntax isn't implemented, and the rule "OR: name contains ++,+-" doesn't seem to work.) I'm sure there's a way to do this in xplorer2, but to my mind the simplest and certainly the most general solution would be to allow selection by regular expressions.

As an implementation issue, it might be possible to accomodate REs without too many changes to the existing user interface. One could impose a syntax which would allow them to be specified in the existing boxes where one enters wild-card filename masks. For example, "/[-+]/" might be recognized as enclosing a RE without there being much risk of ambiguity with an ordinary wild-card mask.

I don't know what this might imply for lookups on other things (file contents, dates, comments, etc.) since I haven't done any searches like that and am unfamiliar with those aspects of xplorer2's interface. I can, however, imagine that some users might find it extremely useful to use REs on the contents of files.

Also, use of regular expressions would allow you to make mass-renaming even snazzier (xplorer2's mass-rename feature is extremely useful and the preview facility is a very nice touch!). It would allow manipulating (detecting, changing, deleting, moving) substrings of a filename which cannot currently be referenced by the existing tokens.

As an implementation issue, it would be necessary to add to the Mass Rename Wizard a "Source Name Template" box where one would specify the selection RE (the one which breaks out substrings and which incidentally also selects files). The existing "Target Name Template" box would then take the replacement part of the RE instead of a wild-card/token mask. To take an absurd example, suppose one wanted to invert the first and last bytes of all 4-byte basenames holding "xx" in the middle ("axxb.txt" -> "bxxa.txt"). The source RE could be "^(.)xx(.)(\..*)$" in which case the replacement RE would be "\2xx\1\3".

There would be a slight difference in the behavior of the Mass Rename Wizard when using REs due to the fact that they also act as selectors. Currently, one selects all the files to be renamed before invoking the Wizard. If one uses a RE inside the Wizard, however, a second selection would be done. I don't see that as a problem since I'd probably often select all files in a directory by typing <ctrl/A> in the active pane and then use the RE to pick out the ones I wanted to change inside the Wizard. You could of course warn the user if his Source Name Template excluded some of the files previously selected in the pane... that might be a useful touch.

I know it would present a formidable challenge explaining the use of RE's in the user documentation, but for me at least, they would be a substantial addition to xplorer2.


5. Crashes

Having read Gruch_s's excellent posting on another beginner's experience, I can confirm that version 1.0.0.3 crashes periodically on my system (XP Pro with service pack 2). I'm sorry not be able to provide further information. (I discovered the existance of these forums when I checked on the netez web site to see if there was a more recent version.)


So, hoping these thoughts may be of some use to somebody, I want to congratulate the xplorer2 team on having made such a fine program.

[nikos]

i think i have replied to your email, in a haste