Longer text boxes for matching and/or regexp support?
Posted: Sun May 30, 2010 11:39 pmI've been using Hazel as a demo for about 3 days now, evaluating it for use in a small business.
I'm having to write shell scripts for simple tasks, eg. to parse a pipe delimited file name.
If I don't do this, first, the regular matching (embedding custom pattern elements to replace the anything element [eg (.+) in a regex) is tedious.
The inability to drag more custom pattern elements directly to the end of the text box is the most frustrating part. It has to be placed near the beginning and then slowly dragged to the end. It would be nice if there was an option to expand the box a bit.
I know that I can embed the shell scripts in the rule but it's only for the action, and not the matching. Having to write the rule twice (once in Hazel, again as a regexp in the shell script) is pretty much pointless.
If there's something I'm missing that can be done quickly, I apologize. I hunted around in the related sections in the help and searched around a bit in the forums and came up with little even relating to that kind of pattern matching, save a post where you explained the custom rules within custom rules trick.
Hazel is great; the ability to match on spotlight attributes without a bunch of dancing in bash is awesome, and the simple rules are easy enough that most of the time I can talk a user through adding one to do what they need on the phone, or just send them a rule file. The fact that it monitors folders means I can stick to writing the rules instead of fighting with FSEvents...
I appreciate your time, effort, and input, considering that I haven't yet purchased Hazel. I'm really in love with it and plan to use it at home but for now it doesn't meet the goals I was shooting for that would make it beneficial at work. I thought that perhaps in posting this on the forums rather than via email it would help someone else who runs across this as well.
I'm having to write shell scripts for simple tasks, eg. to parse a pipe delimited file name.
If I don't do this, first, the regular matching (embedding custom pattern elements to replace the anything element [eg (.+) in a regex) is tedious.
The inability to drag more custom pattern elements directly to the end of the text box is the most frustrating part. It has to be placed near the beginning and then slowly dragged to the end. It would be nice if there was an option to expand the box a bit.
I know that I can embed the shell scripts in the rule but it's only for the action, and not the matching. Having to write the rule twice (once in Hazel, again as a regexp in the shell script) is pretty much pointless.
If there's something I'm missing that can be done quickly, I apologize. I hunted around in the related sections in the help and searched around a bit in the forums and came up with little even relating to that kind of pattern matching, save a post where you explained the custom rules within custom rules trick.
Hazel is great; the ability to match on spotlight attributes without a bunch of dancing in bash is awesome, and the simple rules are easy enough that most of the time I can talk a user through adding one to do what they need on the phone, or just send them a rule file. The fact that it monitors folders means I can stick to writing the rules instead of fighting with FSEvents...
I appreciate your time, effort, and input, considering that I haven't yet purchased Hazel. I'm really in love with it and plan to use it at home but for now it doesn't meet the goals I was shooting for that would make it beneficial at work. I thought that perhaps in posting this on the forums rather than via email it would help someone else who runs across this as well.