Re: Drag 'n drop 'n rename?!

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gmail com>]

On Mon, 2005-07-18 at 13:02 +0200, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> 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".

Just to provide quasi-user input here [1]: I have a set of pretty
simple scripts I sometimes use to do batch renames.  All but one
of them could be handled with your proposed interface, and the
one that can't be handled wouldn't be handled by Purrr either, as
it's not based on patterns or anything [2].

Together with Select Pattern, this could replace some of my scripts.

[1] Yeah, I'm a power user, not an average user.  But I'm a user
nonetheless, and this is something of a power user feature.

[2] Specifically, it renames FLAC files from archive.org according
to information in a MOJO RDF file.

--
Shaun