Comments column- Hot key to or click to enter; Word Wrap

Help & Support
1

I find the Comments column very useful for me to put a short note about what a file is about.

I'm trying to make it a practice when I download a file, I add a comment (eg like the url to the comment field in the file properties.

This definitely helps when months later, I wonder what is the file doing in my download folder.

A couple of points here.

  1. I there an easy way for me to assign a hotkey so that when I can go to the Comment field to enter the data.

Right now I have to Right Click the file, Select Properties, Select the Summary Tab, Click comments before I start entering the comments.

  1. Is there a way to turn Word Wrap on so that I can see all my comments on the file in the Comments Column without having a very large width for the Comments column. Right now, each file takes up one line in a Lister and depending on how wide is my Comments column, part of the comments gets truncated.
2

For 1, try the Description column instead, and the Set Description command in Opus. (File -> File Commands -> Set Description, by default.)

I don't think there's anything for 2, though, sorry.

3

I found that I could create a shortcut key to bring up the dialog box to enter in Descript.ion details by using the following command

SetAttr DESCRIPTION
@NODESELECT

But what I would really like to to take it one step further by not only just to bring up the Descript.ion dialog box, but the paste the contents of my Clipboard into the dialog box.

So I tried :

SetAttr DESCRIPTION
Clipboard PASTE
@NODESELECT

This is particularly useful when say I download a file and I Copy some details from the website (for example "Very useful search utility used by many others." ) onto my clipboard from which I downloaded this file.

What I thought was that when I execute the command

SetAttr DESCRIPTION
Clipboard PASTE
@NODESELECT

It should bring up the Set Description Dialog Box and paste "Very useful search utility used by many others." straight into the box.

But all it does is just bring up the Set Description Dialog Box. I still have to manually paste "Very useful search utility used by many others." into the box.

So effectively

SetAttr DESCRIPTION
Clipboard PASTE
@NODESELECT

still functions like

SetAttr DESCRIPTION
@NODESELECT

That is Clipboard PASTE does not seem to Paste contents of clipboard at all.

I definitely know that there is data in the clipboard since I can manually execute a Paste into the Set Description Dialog Box

Where did I go wrong ?

Thanks

4

Clipboard PASTE pastes the clipboard contents into the lister, not into a dialog box. It's what happens when you press Ctrl-v to paste a file, or the clipboard text or clipboard image, into a lister. You'll probably find a "Clipboard Text.txt" file in the place you ran the button from as a result.

If a command doesn't do what you expect it to do it's always a good idea to check in the manual to see what it's really supposed to do.

To use the contents of the clipboard in a command there is the {clip} external command code. At the moment you have to resort to using dopusrt to use this with an internal command like SetAttr, but the result seems to work fine:

dopusrt /cmd SetAttr DESCRIPTION "{clip}"
@NODESELECT

5

Wow, fantastic

It works like a dream.

But can I dream a little more !

It does paste details into the dialog box as expected, except that it also

  1. closes the dialog box and
  2. the file selected loses focus.

I would like to have it pasted and keep the dialog box Open so that maybe I can add or edit the text pasted in or even add a url.

I thought @NODESELECT is to prevent the focus from being lost.

A 3rd thing I noticed is that if the data in the clipboard has more than one line and the data in the second line is separated by some hidden code (perhaps a hard return), only the first line is pasted.
I'm not sure if DOPUS can resolve this. Maybe some utility that can strip what is in the clipboard to strictly pure text would help.

6

I guess @NODESELECT doesn't work with dopusrt. There's a workaround, though.

This command also displays the dialog like you want:

dopusrt /cmd SetAttr DESCRIPTION="{dlgstring|Description|{clip}}"
dopusrt /cmd select RESELECT

It'll truncate the clipboard text if it has a | in it. Probably nothing that can be done about that. Text with {, } or " may also confuse things, but generally it should work.

7

To get rid of returns and other unwanted characters you'd have to do something a bit more complex involving external tools.

If you can get the clipboard text into a text file and then edit it (sed might be a good tool for the editing) then my SetClip tool can be used to read the text file back into the clipboard.