The Wildcard Issue

Wildcard searches, aka subtitutions, in Rename Master are powerful, but very obscure. Older users that are comfortable with a command prompt are familiar with them, but newer computer users don't understand what the asterisk in "*.txt" represents. While I don't think I could do a good job teaching how to use wildcards, I can fix how the program discloses wildcard support.

In the Renaming Script, any text box that is a "search" or a "find" text box supports wildcards. Unfortunately, there was no way to know that. In the current beta upload, I've marked these fields so they stand out. First, color of the text box is different. Second, the insert button was changed to match the icon used on the new Wildcards menu. Third, the "Wildcards" menu is now only enabled for fields that support it. I think this naturally and intuitively exposes where they are supported.

On the Wildcards menu, I've added three examples with descriptions. While technically there are only 2 wildcards (? and *), I added a third example that explains how using both changes the meaning. The concepts are "1 character exactly", "0 or more characters", and "1 or more characters" -- (?, *, and ?* respectively). This abstract concept is anything but natural and intuitive, but I don't think this is an obtainable goal.

As far as back references for simple wildcards, RM does some dirty tricks to optimize wildcards. The expression "*?" and "?*" are technically the same, so expression like "?*?*" are reduced to "??*". This means it's not possible to report the characters that are represented by each wildcard in the current version. Hopefully, the new Find and Edit step is a good substitute.

A New RM Beta

This upload contains the new Find and Edit script mentioned in the post below. Without using Wildcards, this step is almost the same as both the Add Before/After step and the Find and Replace step. I'm unsure how to document this, beside mentioning it on the help script.

Although "smoother visuals" doesn't sound like much of a change, the Renaming Script steps have been reworked for most events: disable, enable, delete, expand, collapse, move, etc. I'm still researching this for improvements.

A New Step

Shown above is what I've created for the new Find and Edit step. While it's no where near as expressive as back referencing, it should be flexible enough to cover common cases.

The first replace/insert option will add text using a position starting from the beginning or ending of the found phrase. This option is designed for targeting a substring with a known position and size.

The second insert options is more dynamic. It will do a nested find and add text or replace text. Like the initial find text field, the secondary find field also supports wildcards.

This should be available in the next Public Beta upload.

Rename Master Musings

Back Referencing

In the regular expression world, there's the idea of back referencing. For example, if you're searching for "30??", where ? represents two unknown characters, you may want to use the unknown characters as an option. For a regular expression, you use parenthesis to group patterns and \1 or $1 to reference the results of the first pattern.

RM tries to not use such obscure ways of performing tasks as "the normal". While RM include regular expressions as an option, it's only for a very specific and small group of users. My job is to come up with a way that's more intuitive. This is one of the reasons "Remove/Replace Expression" was created and "Split and Move". Both steps are simpler ways to do "regular expression"-like functionality, but are still very advanced concepts.

I recently had one user trying to use the simplified wildcards to do back referencing: replacing "30??" with "20??". The first part works, the second part does not. While it seems like a good idea to add this feature, so few users would know about this feature that it doesn't warrant the large amount of work required to support this.

Find and Alter

My idea to support back referencing would be a step specifically designed for this single task. The benefits are simple, it's easy to discover and should be easier to learn. The sacrifice is just as simple, it's not as powerful. For those that need more power, Regular Expressions are still an option -- so it's still balanced.

The problem I'm having is implementing this "simple" task. Currently, you can find a phrase and remove it, replace it, or add text before/after it using existing Renaming Steps. To be able to alter it, you need to specify specific parts of the found phrase. There are a ton of ways to specify the parts: the first/last X characters, the first/last X characters from a set, a specific substring at position X with length Y, starts with-contains-ends-with expressions, and so on.

The step can't implement all possible options, so it needs to address the most important and most common tasks. I think the "index and length" option and the "first/last X characters" would cover a lot of cases. It also may be possible to combine both options into a single options, since starting at index 1 with length 3 would be the same as starting with the first 3 characters. Using a length of zero to represent an insert instead of a replace may be a bit confusing. A second option could be inserting before or after a specific phrase. It may seem redundant, but the ability to find "ABCD" and insert after "AB" is a much more specific operation that a regular Add Before/After routine.

Currently, I don't have enough of a well formed idea to begin experimenting. I'm going to need to think about this problem some more before starting any work.

No News

Feedback usually appears in bursts with long lulls in between. Now is one of those lulls. I'm currently at a point where there's not enough planned for development to warrant a beta release.

The only thing I'm currently working on is small tweaks to Makelinks. However, this extension doesn't have an audience on this site for beta versions to work. Even though it's been downloaded more than 70,000 times, thats relatively low compared to the most popular extensions.

Possible ArsClip Scope Change

As said before, the scope of ArsClip is limited to copy and paste automation. Anything that can help this task is considered, even if it can be used for tasks outside this scope. I've had to reject text editing task ideas and full-on macros since it's out of the scope. Even the simplest text editor or macro program will do this task much better. For automation, I have to include some macro abilities, so it's a grey area.

I may change my mind and expand the scope to clipboard editing. Right now, there are 2 Clipboard editing commands in the program: a find and replace, and a trim. As long as it's clipboard manipulation, I can rationalize this a being truly related to copying/pasting automation.

I'm currently looking through past emails for common ideas for text manipulation. The only common feedback I'm seeing is a case changing feature.

EDIT: v4.11 will include a new "Edit Clipboard" submenu. While some examples are added that show how to replace whitespace, there are technically no new commands added to the program. New commands are planned for the next version.

ArsClip Wrapup

The last new feature is being placed into the program. I figured out a workaround for displaying the Popup using the pinned taskbar icon. A new "Jump List" configuration page has been added to to show how Jump Lists work and to select the default action when the taskbar icon is clicked. This will be included in Release Candidate 1.

For version 4.11, the main feature will be the improved visuals for the popup. The color generation now better supports a wider range and the icons have been reworked for this. The visual cue showing a clip on the clipboard is now intuitive. Shortcut keys are now easier to read.

The second major feature will be improved shortcut key support. While the arrow keys can still be used, shortcut keys can now be used to navigate within expandable menus and submenus. These shortcut keys only appear when these menus are activated by a keystroke.

ArsClip Colors

'Metro Steel Blue' example color scheme shown above.

I've been spending a lot of time working with how colors are shown on the popup. Since colors are now customizable, I've had to adjust for widely different color settings. I've added several selectable example color schemes in the Configuration to help get started.

The default settings are still based off of the current system's color scheme. New colors are created by adjusting the brightness level of these colors. For example, the left column is the same as the background color but darker. The same rules are used for custom colors.

The way double-height menus are displayed has also changed. Now, a gradient is used to visibly separate the clip from other clips. This method seems to be the least intrusive way to show two lines are part of a single clip.

These changes are in the current Public Beta upload.