KBD Quirks and Features, Deletion, Renaming and Regexp

vtatila · Post by **vtatila** » 2007 Jul 02, 12:03

Hi list,
I'm a Finnish sight-impaired power user and hav been using 2X Explorer and Xplorer occasionally for some time. Now, I'm seriously getting away from Windows Explorer after having realized that with screen reader software and keyboard use, whose focus can be at only one place at a time, tabs are far preferrable to the panes for me. They also reduce visual complexity of the UI and make usage with heavy full-screen magnification easier. The things I like most about Xplorer 2 so far are the tabs, all the nice hotkey extras compared to Explorer, the various details columns offered including audio parameters, and the quick viewer as a substitute for Sound Forge's audio file previewing.

And now to the keyboard questions, quirks and ideas I have:
First of all, when I switch auto completion to Explorer style, I can tab to the address bar but hav not found a way to tab away from it back to the single pane I have visible. Is that possible? tab, shift+tab, ctrl+tab etc... do nothing like that. alt+tabbing to some other window and back returns the focus to the pane. If I switch off the Explorer style I can press ctrl+tab to go to the address bar and tab to go back to the pane. I don't have the tree visible at all. Xplorer Lite version is 1.6.5.3 and the OS is XP Pro SP2 English. In Windows Explorer, tabbing between the address bar and file pane works OK, too. I can also press alt+d to get their directly. In case you were wondering, the Explorer style auto complete is far preferrable to me, as I can just read a single line at a time with heavy full-screen magnification and speech follows the keyboard focus, too.

Another thing is selection. When selecting from the keyboard, is it possible to make two separate contiguous selections using shift+arrows say by also holding the control key to avoid destroying the selection? This does not seem to work as expected, in stead the first contiguous selection is extended to the first item of the second one. I avoid this by doing those selections sequentially as managing the sticky mode is hard with a screen readder, you'll have to cursor to an item to get its selection status as it then has the focus.

Another curiousity about the contiguous shift selections is that they have a direction. When adding files to an ad hoc Winamp playlist via multiple selection, it does mattter from which end I start an identical looking contiguous selection from the keyboard. I noticed this by accident a couple of days back, although I've been using Windows since 95. Could this selection direction be made more visually apparent? COuld a menu entry or hotkey be added that reverses the direction without changing the selection? If there's a selection with contiguous and non-contiguous items, in which order are they passed as arguments to the associated program exactly? One would assume it is top to botom left to right plus the direction of the contiguous selection. Or maybe it is selection order.

One thing which Explorer does better than Xplorer 2 would be Recycle Bin handling. I've set it to move without confirmation and use it as a safety net myself. When I accidentally delete something I didn't mean to, I can simply hit ctrl+z to bring the most recently deleted thing back from the recycle bin, or put it back again, and I think Explorer even manages this on a per folder basis. could xplorer 2 have this support? The way I use it, this is essential functionality. SUre I can open another tab to the bin, sort by modified date, and dig up the things manually, but that's not quite as easy.

I think the tabs are very nice but their drawback is sequential keyboard navigation. Could a hotkey be added that pops up a menu of tabs like Quick tabs in IE when you hit ctrl+shift+q.

Could an alternative mode for file wildcards be added, namely Perl 5 compliant regular expressions? This might be bloat, though, if the demand is low and the feature is thought of being too complex, so perhaps additional wildcard chars could do the trick e.g. ^ $ and [] as in regexp, too.

There's readily made libraries for regexpes. Although the syntax is complex for simple things and capturing groups, look around, multiline matching and substitutions probably would not be needed, I still like it for complex cases in apps like NoteTab Pro, Findstr and Perl itself, of course. particularly useful is the ability to use character groups in selecting files e.g. list all /^vbrun\d{3}\.dll$/ files or files that start out with bak like this /^bak/. Sure, substitutions would be nice, too, if one could use them in renaming. I still am not very big a fan of the Xplorer 2 tags or those used by the Xp for loop, for that matter, but hey that's just me.

Lastly about the search in Windows that Xplorer Lite uses, is there a good workaround for identical filenames due to folder flattening in search results. If I have files like
/foo/bar
and /baz/bar
searching for bar comes up with two items. If I then try to copy them from search results to Xplorer 2, Xplorer says there's already an identically named file. Could Xplorer give options for sequential numbering for both, for renaming the first or second, for creating one or more levels of sub folders starting at the end of the original paths, or cancelling the copy. This could be extended to all identical filename clashes e.g. due to renaming attempts.

Hope this can be of help. I'll be away for a long time from Wednesday onwards but will watch this topic keenly until that time.

Post by **nikos** » 2007 Jul 02, 13:03

why, you said a handful there

when I switch auto completion to Explorer style, I can tab to the address bar but hav not found a way to tab away from it back to the single pane

this is a bit of a bug that i can't correct; pressing escape key works though

is it possible to make two separate contiguous selections using shift+arrows

no

I can simply hit ctrl+z to bring the most recently deleted thing back from the recycle bin

you can't do that in xplorer2 but you can get inside the bin, sort by "date deleted" and see the most recently deleted files. You can then select, right click on them and pick restore

the professional version supports regexps (not a personal favorite of mine) but only for text searches in files. The pro version also has options to automatically rename files in case a name already exists in the destination folder (while you are copying)

vtatila · Post by **vtatila** » 2007 Jul 02, 16:43

[quote="nikos"]why, you said a handful there :) [/quote]
Yeah, that's a common problem for me. As using newsgroups from the keyboard is so much easier than using a Web forum without the mouse, I tend to actually put a number of topics in a single mail in stead of creating multiple posts.

[quote]when I switch auto completion to Explorer style, I can tab to the address bar but hav not found a way to tab away from it back to the single pane[/quote]
[quote="nikos"] this is a bit of a bug that i can't correct; pressing escape key works though [/quote]
OK, good to know. Esc works just as well, as it is close to the tab key anyway. I wish this could be documented, too.

[quote] I can simply hit ctrl+z to bring the most recently deleted thing back from the recycle bin[/quote]
[quote="nikos"] you can't do that in xplorer2 but you can get inside the bin, <snippage> [/quote]
Ah hat will do ok, too. Not quite as handy but certainly doable. Which reminds me. I've found bookmarks greatly helpful. Now I can hit tab c enter to open control panel, tab d enter to open my documents and so on. I've created 1 to 4 letter bookmark names that can be used in the address bar for direct navigation. I have plenty of uniquely named leaf folders I access frequently, stuff like C:\vellu\programming\plx\util, and now with a bookmark as a quick navigation alias, accessing them is extremely fast and mnemonic no matter where I am. before I found this out today, I would go back to C and start navigating from their or use relative paths.

[quote="nikos"] the professional version supports regexps (not a personal favorite of mine) but only for text searches in files.[/quote]
Ah for that functionality I'm quite happy with what NoteTab Pro has to offer. It can search folders with Perl compliant regexp and open all matching files in separate tabs for examination. so I'll just copy the path over to NoteTab and that's that.

[quote="nikos"] The pro version also has options to automatically rename files in case a name already exists in the destination folder [/quote]
Useful in deed. Which reminds me, what are the default copying options in Xplorer Lite when its Native copy function is used?

Post by **nikos** » 2007 Jul 02, 17:04

there are many ways you can accelerate bookmark use. First you can assign keyboard shortcuts to bookmarks, using Bookmarks | Organize dialog. Then each bookmark is just a shortcut key away. Second, you can type (part of) a bookmark name in the addressbar and hit <up-arrow> and the bookmark name will be fetched; press enter to browse it (i'm not sure if this works in the lite version). And as you'd expect, there are even more bookmark goodies in the pro version, as e.g. the miniscrap pane, see this snapshot for the possibilities:
www.zabkat.com/pic/s2a.png

in lite version copy is through windows drag drop. There is no provision for automatic renaming, overwrite support (e.g. skip older files) and so on