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My complaint about this preferene pane - no wildcards in menu names. macOS has a handy "Batch rename" feature in the contextual menu when you right click on fi
by wlesieutre 7y ago
My complaint about this preferene pane - no wildcards in menu names.
macOS has a handy "Batch rename" feature in the contextual menu when you right click on files. The renaming GUI gives you options for sequential numbers, text replacement, prefixes, suffixes, inserting dates.
But the menu to open this is called "Rename X Items…" so you can't assign a keyboard shortcut to it. Might be 5 items, might be 2914 items. Without wildcards you'd have to make a different shortcut for every different quantity.
- bobbylarrybobby 7y agoI agree with your criticism, but what I've done to mitigate this issue is bind a keyboard shortcut to an AppleScript that walks through Finder's Edit menu and looks for an item beginning with "Rename"
- kccqzy 7y agoYou can make an actual Automator service to do the batch renaming and then call it whatever you want. The Automator version also has more features than the Finder one.
- Wowfunhappy 7y agoThis, but I think the more general point here would be that the system preferences panel is for dead simple stuff, and Apple does provide more powerful tools (namely, Automator and Applescript) if you need them. I love Applescript. My entire home entertainment setup basically runs on Applescript—each button on my Harmony remote triggers a different script. There's no equivalent on Windows—you can use Autohotkey, kind of, but without any sort of Apple Event-esque specification it isn't nearly as useful/nice.