[xplorer˛] — Addressbar trix
home » blog » 12 August 2007
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"The Web site you seek, cannot be located but, endless others exist" — random Heiku

As a follower of the Enlightment I don't believe in reincarnation and all that mumbo-jumbo, but I think that somehow Napoleon made a second appearance, I mean here's an arrogant prat in the making or what? Mellow out dude!

Now I've got this off my chest, and as I'm running to catch my flight to Las Vegas (I'll be out for a couple of weeks), here's a quick list of cool things (read: time-savers) you can do with the addressbar.

  • Path autocompletion. That's the way windows explorer does it too, e.g. you start typing c:\ then you see a list of folders below c:\ in a list you can select and so on. With a few key presses you can go a long way compliling long paths. Nowadays with right-click breadcrumbs on each pane's titlebar this isn't the boon it used to be, but good to keep in mind since it is also used in all other input fields that accept paths, e.g. the Find dialog.
     
  • History fetch. The addressbar holds a history of paths you've visited recently. To quickly jump to one of those past locations without extending the drop-down portion, just type a few characters present anywhere in the folder path name, and hit the up-arrow key. Typing nny will fetch the path c:\users\nikos\newkenny\blog. If there are more than one possible completions, just hit up-arrow again and so on. This is my personal favorite autocompletion mode.
     
  • Bookmark fetch. The addressbar "understands" bookmark names too, as you've defined them in Bookmarks menu. You can type a complete bookmark name to jump to the associated folder, or even better, type part of the bookmark name and hit up-arrow key as above to have it auto-completed for you.
     
  • Command execution. This is a lengthy subject that we'll return to another time. In summary you type a > or $ prompt character (depending on the command type you want to launch) followed by the program name and arguments. While in this mode, you can add filenames from the active pane to the argument list pressing <ctrl+Enter>. To move the focus around and select another file press <ctrl+arrow_key>.
     
  • Quicksearch. This has been demonstrated in a previous post. A colon : followed by some keyword will either select or filter items in the active pane that contain the keyword in their name or other detail column.
     
  • Drag-drop. Select any file and drag-drop it to the addressbar to locate said item. This is most useful when you drag items in from outside xplorer˛, e.g. from the desktop or some other program.

Here's the accompanying demo. See you in a couple of weeks!

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