Re: Drag 'n drop 'n rename?!

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Mon, 2005-07-18 at 12:41 +0200, Maciej Katafiasz wrote:
> Dnia 18-07-2005, pon o godzinie 11:35 +0200, Alexander Larsson napisał:
> > I once had the idea of allowing renames in the property dialog for
> > multiple files. Say you select multiple files and bring up the property
> > dialog, and all the files start are of the form "fooXXXXbar.jpg". It
> > would be cool if the entry for the name allowed you to edit the "foo"
> > and the "bar.jpg" part of the names, while displaying an uneditable
> > symbolic representation for the XXXX part.
> 
> How do you determine XXXX though?
> 
> Say you have these 3 files (taken from my current downloads queue):
> 
> [AF-F]Petit_Cossette_Vol1[R2_DVD][91878FA5].avi
> [AF-F]Petit_Cossette_Vol2[R2_DVD][320FFC2F].avi
> [AF-F]Petit_Cossette_Vol3_end[R2_DVD][16818DF3].avi

The simplest algorithm here would let you edit
"[AF-F]Petit_Cossette_Vol" and "].avi". This is not ideal in the case
where you have badly named files you want to rename, but its very useful
to rename the files as a set, if they had not-too-bad names initially.

I'm sure that if you search the literature a bit you can also come up
with an algorithm that lets you edit the "[R2_DVD]" part too.

With this system its its for instance very easy to rename a directory
full of photos from a digital camera such that you preserve the original
numbers, but replace the initial "img_" prefix with something that is
more descriptive. It will also let you easily change e.g. prefixes from
".JPG" to ".jpg".

> What is XXXX here? I do realise that variables syntax is more complex
> than we'd like it to be (for the above, to get the correct names in
> Purrr, I'd use something along 
> "Le Portrait de Petit Cossette - ([C,,,2]) \[sub]\[AF-F].avi" 
> or 
> "Le Portrait de [B_6:20] - ([C,,,2]) \[sub][B:6][e.]" 

Anything that requires any of these is just a total non-starter for the
a large subset of users. Thats not saying its not useful for some, but
you can't really claim that it "solves" an issue as it only solves it
for quite a limited subset of the userbase.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a war-weary hunchbacked senator possessed of the uncanny powers of an 
insect. She's a radical Buddhist detective from Mars. They fight crime!