Requested External editors enhancements

[mclark]

First, heartfelt thanks for such a wonderful and free program. I am sure sometimes it feels like all give and no receive, a lot of effort and not much reward, so I apologize ahead of time for adding to the clamor of requests.

I would like to request a few enhancements to the External Editor feature.

1) Add unique mnemonics (keyboard accelerators) to each entry in the "Open with external editor" submenu. As it stands now, all menu entries start with "(". If each entry started with, for example, a number, it would make it easier to use the keyboard to navigate this menu.

2) Add a few more slots for external editors. Three is nice, but I have filled them up and would like to add a few more. Right now I have: Photoshop, Explore, Copy file path to clipboard.

As an alternative to #2, I would love to see "Explore to..." and "Copy File Path" added as built-in features to IrfanView. Allow me to explain and motivate these two features a little further:

"Explore to..." would open a new explorer window and select the current file in the Explorer window. This is easily done with

explorer.exe /n,/select,filename of the image.jpg

The motivation for this feature is simple but compelling: it allows you to, in your workflow, quickly transition from working with/viewing a file in IrfanView to any other program which supports drag'n'drop and/or file object copy+paste. No need to set up external editors, no need to write proprietary integration routines for "popular" 3rd party programs. Almost every program on your computer supports drag'n'drop and/or file object copy+paste. Adding the ability for IrfanView to quickly and easily pop an Explorer window that is staged and ready to start a drag'n'drop or file object copy+paste operation for the current file, amounts to (limited, but useful) integration with just about every Windows desktop app!

Second, "Copy File Path" would do just that: it would copy to the clipboard a string representation of the current file's path. For example:
C:\Documents and Settings\mclark\My Documents\My Pictures\camping.jpg

The motivation for this feature is similar to the "explore" feature: almost every program on your computer has an "Open File" dialog. In this dialog there is a text field where you can ... paste a path!. Thus, you can use IrfanView to locate images easily, then quickly point some other program at that file, by copying the path to the file out of IrfanView and then quickly pasting the path into the 3rd party app's File Open browse window. No need to set up an external editor (the list for which can fill up, and the configuration of which can be difficult -- or impossible if the program in question does not accept command line arguments.) Just: copy path, alt-tab, paste path!

(I know that you can press "I" to bring up the File Information screen, press tab three times, then press Ctrl-C. I do this frequently. However, it would be nice if it was an easy hotkey (like Ctrl-Shift-C) or at least a first-order-menu menu item.)

thanks again for the excellent and high quality program!!

Mike

[Mij]

I agree with some of this. It would indeed be useful to have hotkeys for each of the external editors (Shift+1, Shift+2 and Shift+3 perhaps).

You can have Window Explorer as an external editor right now. My first external editor is C:\windows\explorer.exe "/select,"%1 .
Shift+E then opens Explorer at the current image, ready to right click and Open with the associated application or Send to any of the applications I have in my SendTo folder. Is that much different to what you want with your Explore to and Copy path to features?

[mclark]

I agree with some of this. It would indeed be useful to have hotkeys for each of the external editors (Shift+1, Shift+2 and Shift+3 perhaps).

You can have Window Explorer as an external editor right now. My first external editor is C:\windows\explorer.exe "/select,"%1 .
Shift+E then opens Explorer at the current image, ready to right click and Open with the associated application or Send to any of the applications I have in my SendTo folder. Is that much different to what you want with your Explore to and Copy path to features?

No, not much different, and I am already doing both of these things for myself. One difference is that Copy-path is much more generic than SendTo. Not all applications accept "send tos" (for example, I can't use SendTo to fill out a file upload form on Flickr.)

I just think Explore-to and Copy-path are by far generic enough and useful enough to be both built-in and hotkeyed. Just not having to waste External Program space by having to implement these features for yourself as external programs, would be nice.

I'd rather use my external programs for external programs (animated gif editor, photoshop, inkscape, etc.) rather than generic file manipulation routines (that are hard to set up, and many people don't know it's even possible.)

[Mij]

Yes. Good points.
It is surprisingly difficult to copy a complete path, both folder and file name, from either IrfanView or Explorer. Although it can be displayed in various ways, it does appear that the only place it can be copied to clipboard in IrfanView is from the Information dialog.

Not tried it myself but I understand that Send To Toys allows you to add Send to clipboard (as name) to the Explorer context menu

[mclark]

Not tried it myself but I understand that Send To Toys allows you to add Send to clipboard (as name) to the Explorer context menu

Cool! I have been using CopyPathExt[1] for that, but it crashes with long lists of files, so I will try the one at your link.

On a side note, it looks like Microsoft has added two of my two favorite shell extensions (Copy Path[2] and Command Prompt Here[3]) as "built-ins" in Vista (and I assume Win7.) Apparently they show up if you hold shift while right clicking. This is something I will be looking forward to when I upgrade to Win7.

Mike

1. http://www.codeproject.com/KB/shell/copypathext.aspx
2. http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2...y-as-path.aspx
3. http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2...18/761092.aspx

[Skippybox]

It is surprisingly difficult to copy a complete path, both folder and file name, from IrfanView. Although it can be displayed in various ways, it does appear that the only place it can be copied to clipboard in IrfanView is from the Information dialog.

Not hard at all. Just use SHIFT+P!

[Mij]

There's always seems to be another keyboard shortcut that I don't know about!

What a pity they are not properly incorporated into the Help file so that you can find them with Search.

[Skippybox]

There's always seems to be another keyboard shortcut that I don't know about!

Hee-hee.

What a pity they are not properly incorporated into the Help file so that you can find them with Search.

It's easy to find them in Help. They are all together in one place in Contents>Available Hotkeys>Hotkeys. You can use Search to find a highlighted word related to something, even for hotkeys. Typing "copy filename" easily produces a result in Hotkeys.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

There's always seems to be another keyboard shortcut that I don't know about!

What a pity they are not properly incorporated into the Help file so that you can find them with Search.

Bookmark this page

[Skippybox]

Bookmark this page

Your (Shift + Alpha Key) section is misaligned starting at K/L.

[Mij]

It's easy to find them in Help. They are all together in one place in Contents>Available Hotkeys>Hotkeys. You can use Search to find a highlighted word related to something, even for hotkeys. Typing "copy filename" easily produces a result in Hotkeys.

That's the common problem with Help. You can only find something if you already know it is there and what it is called.

Under the Help menu is the title "Keyboard shortcuts" where I know to look them up when I need to. Open "IrfanView Help" and search for either "Keyboard" or "Shortcuts" or both words as a title and no topics are found. That is because in Help the title is now Hotkeys.

While answering this question I did actually do searches for "copy path", "copy path clipboard" and "copy name" in Help. None of them even returned Hotkeys as a topic. To discover Shift+P in a search you have to know the keyword "filename" not "file" or "name" or "path" as it is called in other applications we were discussing. "Filename" it seems is not similar to "file" or "name".

Not surprising that it has taken me 10 years to discover it.

Yes Bhikkhu, I did know of your excellent web page but I would not have discovered it there either for all the same reasons.

What Irfanview badly needs are more advanced tutorials that include these lesser known features. We might then all discover things we did not know.

[jazzman]

There's always seems to be another keyboard shortcut that I don't know about!

Me too! - That's why reading topics here is so rewarding, even if they seem not relevant to my interests at first.

Bookmark this page

Also missing there
SHIFT+F fit big images to screen
SHIFT+N new image dialog
SHIFT+O fit window to image
SHIFT+V canvas dialog
SHIFT+W fit image to window

[mclark]

Oh!! Shift-P! Awesome. Thank you all!

[Skippybox]

That's the common problem with Help. You can only find something if you already know it is there and what it is called.

I understand Help is not perfect, but it's still useful. It's kind of like a dictionary. How do you find a word's spelling if you don't know how to spell it!

Under the Help menu is the title "Keyboard shortcuts" where I know to look them up when I need to. Open "IrfanView Help" and search for either "Keyboard" or "Shortcuts" or both words as a title and no topics are found. That is because in Help the title is now Hotkeys.

In the Index, the keyword "Keyboard shortcuts" is there.

While answering this question I did actually do searches for "copy path", "copy path clipboard" and "copy name" in Help. None of them even returned Hotkeys as a topic. To discover Shift+P in a search you have to know the keyword "filename" not "file" or "name" or "path" as it is called in other applications we were discussing. "Filename" it seems is not similar to "file" or "name".

Searching can be hard, especially on the Web. Usually when specific doesn't work, making a general search for just "copy" works better. You already know what you want, so you'll only have to scan one page for the highlighted term.

Not surprising that it has taken me 10 years to discover it.

You should of called me a lot sooner.

What Irfanview badly needs are more advanced tutorials that include these lesser known features. We might then all discover things we did not know.

Only you can write them!