Workbench Tools Menu Enhancement: WBCutnPaste.lha

[Weaselrama]

Greetings,

@Daedalus has posted WBCutnPaste on Aminet. It is a set of 3 AREXX scripts and a starter script which adds Copy and Paste and Cut and Paste to the Workbench Tools Menu. I have tested this myself and it appears very straight-forward and does as advertized.

"WBCutnPaste
~~~~~~~~~~~
WBCutnPaste is a small collection of ARexx scripts which provide basic cut, copy
and paste file actions to Workbench. It optionally adds menu items to the Tools
menu, or can be used with your favourite hotkey or menu editor

I wrote the basic versions of these scripts many years ago, and have now
been reminded of them and so have decided to tidy them up and release them for
anyone else who may find them useful.


Requirements
~~~~~~~~~~~~
WBCutnPaste requires:

- OS 3.5+ (Tested on OS 3.9, 3.1.4 and 4.1)
- ARexx running (RexxMast should be started at a higher priority if it's in
WBStartup so that it's available before the script starts)


Installation
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Installation by hand is easy:

1) Copy WBCut.rexx, WBCopy.rexx and WBPaste.rexx to REXX:

2) Either drop WBCutnPasteMenu.rexx (and its icon) into WBStartup to add the
relevant entries to the Tools menu, or else use your favourite menu or
hotkey program to add the shortcuts to the scripts yourself. ToolsDaemon,
THE, FKey, AllKeys etc. should work fine.


Usage
~~~~~
Once set up, you should now have three menu items in the Tools menu:

- WBCut (Shortcut RAmiga+X)
This item will make a list of the selected files in the current window to be
moved to a new location. Once pasted, the files will be removed from their
old location.

- WBCopy (Shortcut RAmiga+G)
This item will make a list of the selected files in the current window to be
duplicated at a new location.

- WBPaste (Shortcut RAmiga+V)
This item takes a previous list of selected files and either moves them or
copies them to the currently active drawer window. If the files already exist,
you will be asked whether to skip or replace them. If a cut or copied drawer
already exists and you choose Replace or Replace All, the new contents of the
drawer will overwrite the old contents, but any existing files that aren't
overwritten by cut or copied files with the same name will remain untouched. In
other words, the drawer contents will be merged with the existing drawer.

Files copied and pasted to the same location will be duplicated with modified
names, similar to the original Workbench Copy command.


OS 4 Use
~~~~~~~~
Please note that, while these scripts work fine on OS4, they don't use the
same clipboard as the Workbench context menu, and therefore files cut or copied
with these scripts can't be pasted with the context menu paste option, and vice
versa.


History
~~~~~~~
1.0 (15.06.2020)
First release."

http://aminet.net/package/util/wb/WBCutnPaste

[npagonis73]

Great utilities. They work great on 3.1.4!!

[PeterK]

Yes, these Arexx scripts are a very nice add-on for the Workbench tools menu.

Unfortunately, I always got error messages when I tried to copy and paste icons without a file. These scripts don't check for the existence of the source file before trying to copy it, so I've added that myself to the paste script.

Maybe the author Rob Cranley can check and fix that for all cases when icons without files need to be copied, because the error message is no bug, but a bit annoying.

[Daedalus]

Thanks guys Yeah, that's simple to add. Since I so rarely have icons without files associated, it's not a use case that ever occurred to me, but it does assume that the item to be copied is a file with an optional icon. I'll add a check for the next release so it ignores files that don't exist - thinking about it now, that error would also crop up if you copied a file and then the file was removed before it was pasted. Normal behaviour in that case would be to just do nothing rather than report an error, so it would also solve that issue.

I'll sort it out over the weekend

[Weaselrama]

Originally Posted by PeterK

Unfortunately, I always got error messages when I tried to copy and paste icons without a file. These scripts don't check for the existence of the source file before trying to copy it, so I've added that myself to the paste script.

Oooh...yeah, that could be bad. I maintain an archive of a wide variety of icons - nothing but .info files.

Daedalus dug this out of his archive because we were having a discussion on another thread regarding Magellan taking over the Workbench - which is why I don't use it - and why at least some of Magellan's functionality couldn't be built right into the Workbench itself. He was kind enough to dust this off and give it a whirl. Maybe it will lead others to start thinking along the lines of building such Workbench enhancements, pushing the Workbench just a little further into the 21st century.

I've been wondering if it wouldn't be possible to give the Workbench an additional folder view: text list + small icons, a view type common to all modern OSs. Just a thought.

[honx]

can i use this along with THE from os3.9 and move your commands to a sub menu?

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by Weaselrama

Maybe it will lead others to start thinking along the lines of building such Workbench enhancements, pushing the Workbench just a little further into the 21st century.

There should be some more little improvements in 3.2 when that comes along.

I've been wondering if it wouldn't be possible to give the Workbench an additional folder view: text list + small icons, a view type common to all modern OSs. Just a thought.

Suddenly we're getting into a much bigger job with that. First off, adding new view modes will be an extensive change to Workbench itself, and probably pretty difficult to patch in. Additionally, because all icons can be different sizes, and the Amiga icon format doesn't include alternative sizes, icon scaling would need to be done. The standard 3.x icon.library doesn't support this, and even if it did, it would be very slow on lower-end CPUs, especially if you had a large number of files to display. It has been done for OS4 though... OS 4's icon system does include scaling, and its Workbench does include that viewmode (see the screengrab), but it's aimed at machines in the hundreds of MHz + RTG screenmodes as standard. So it's possible in theory, should there ever be a 68k Workbench aimed at high spec machines.

Originally Posted by honx

can i use this along with THE from os3.9 and move your commands to a sub menu?

Yep, they're just simple ARexx scripts for each function. It includes an additional script for adding the menu items, but you can use whatever you like - THE is good, as are ToolsDaemon, FKey and others, and you'll have more control over the names and shortcuts that way.

[Weaselrama]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

... but it's aimed at machines in the hundreds of MHz + RTG screenmodes as standard. So it's possible in theory, should there ever be a 68k Workbench aimed at high spec machines.

..and that answers that. Good to know and very interesting.

[AMIGASYSTEM]

@ honx
On another discussion I posted a screnshot showing the scripts insertion on T.H.E, I enclose here too


@Weaselrama
AfA_Prefs has the function to resize the Icons, it works with OS4 and Glowicons icons, it doesn't work with Dual-PNG Icons.

Before you try, back up your system

[abbub]

This is fantastic! And I'm running 3.1.4 on the main machine, so it looks like I should be able to use it!

[Daedalus]

Slightly updated version 1.1 of the scripts has been uploaded to Aminet and my website. This change adds filechecks to make sure it doesn't try to copy files that don't exist - either because they are only icons, or because they've since been moved or removed.

Thanks for the feedback

[James]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

Slightly updated version 1.1 of the scripts has been uploaded to Aminet and my website. This change adds filechecks to make sure it doesn't try to copy files that don't exist - either because they are only icons, or because they've since been moved or removed.

Thanks!

[indigolemon]

Updated, thanks Daedalus

[PeterK]

Thank you!

[Weaselrama]

Thanks for the update!

[fluffkitten]

I'm liking this, think its definitely worth having.

[trixster]

this is great, thanks for sharing

[Weaselrama]

Originally Posted by AMIGASYSTEM

@Weaselrama
AfA_Prefs has the function to resize the Icons, it works with OS4 and Glowicons icons, it doesn't work with Dual-PNG Icons.

Before you try, back up your system

It isn't just a matter of rendering small icons, although I could see where whatever the routine AROS uses to resize them on the fly might be useful. Specifically, however, a list view that incorporates icons is often visually helpful in performing file maintenance especially if one can sort by name or by type. As @Daedalus pointed out, this sort of functionality, while not impossible, would have to be geared toward enhanced hardware or emulation.

@Daedalus: If you haven't gotten AfA running, I would like to suggest you do. I myself am sold on it and could never go back. The font-smooting alone is worth it. The best part is that it doesn't increase load - it decreases it and I'm still unclear as to why but it has a real-world dividend of lowering the CPU load and heat on my MBP running FS-UAE and it is significant. I was already running a virtual A4000 w/ 68060 and the WB is just faster with overall lower CPU load which as I wrote earlier, translates into a real-world decrease on the Mac's own CPU load.

@AMIGASYSTEM has a video that walks you step-by-step through the installation, made necessary by the fact the documentation in the archive is missing so many steps, particularly the two commands which must be entered in the startup-sequence to launch it, and the immediate house-cleaning that must be performed on the first run in AfA Prefs. There's some additional hocus-pocus that has to be performed, such as replacing AfA's TTF_Manager with the earlier FTManager it was built from for better TTF management. The picture.datatype in AfA is worthless and should be replaced with 45.17 and there are some issues with its icon.library and Magellan v5 for which there's a work-around.

[James]

Originally Posted by Weaselrama

The picture.datatype in AfA is worthless and should be replaced with 45.17

The AfA picture.datatype is the only one to support alpha channels on OS3 based Amigas. This is one of the major reasons to use AfA.

[AMIGASYSTEM]

As explained on other threads the AfA picture_datatype.exe cannot be replaced with any datatypes.library because it could cause problems on graphic backgrounds as it happens with ls WBStartup bar (see screenshot).

Even if with "picture_datatype.exe" the thumbnails of "Eastern" are not of quality.

The AfA icon_lib.exe can now be totally replaced with the Peterk icon.library, as shown in the video now all works well.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cjG...ew?usp=sharing