Productivity Windows Tools again

After PyWinContext in post Free Manager for Custom Context Menus in Windows  I came across another Context Menu Customization tools that manages your popular Folders.

MyFolder

Within File Explorer you right click and in the menu there is a new item called MyFolders that lets you copy/move files to specific directories or Goes to that folder, or opens command prompt in a specific folder.

Quite a handy tool for me as I’m always using Right Mouse Click on files to do things like Open, Copy and other actions (I use it more frequently on tablets with the TouchPad, as being left handed I usually end up doing a Right Click rather than left click.- Now I think about that, maybe I should see if I can reverse that (it seems you can’t on the MS surface tablets or book)).

It only seems to work in File Explorer, so if you are say, uploading a file and it starts you in Documents folder , you cannot right click in address window as the MyFolder option does not come up. You’d have to use either pyWinContext (not tested) or Quick Access Popup.

7+ Taskbar Tweaker

I found this article 8 Tools to Customize Your Windows 10 that showed a few Window  including Winaero Tweaker and Ultimate Windows Tweaker which are both windows customising tools but I was not interested in them personally.

7+ Taskbar Tweaker was another tool I came across, that adds some functionality to the taskbar. See video below.

I tried reducing the gap between the icons on the taskbar, but as I have small icons on the taskbar they became far too tightly packed and hard to differentiate. As well as this tool there was, on the same website :

7+ Taskbar Numberer: taskbar numbers for Utter Command

7+ Taskbar Numberer: taskbar numbers for Utter Command tool that would put a number on the task icon. This I thought might be a useful too. For use with the WIN KEY and the number of the icon to open specific programmes.

I tend to move the icons to the lft for the ones I’m using currently but can only really count up to 4 or 5 along the row, so only use the WIN + Icon number for the most popular programmes. This , if it had worked, would have extended my use of that method a lot further

For both of the above programmes I got a Norton 360 warning about a virus. The one for 7+ Taskbar Tweaker went away, but I never got the 7+ Taskbar Numberer to work, which was a shame as that was the one I was most interested in.

On the same site though there is a nice little app

Textify

Textify is a text capture tool.
Have you ever wanted to copy some text from a dialog box which doesn’t provide such functionality?
Textify was created to solve this problem: you can point your mouse over the text, click on the mouse shortcut (Shift + Middle click by default), and get a selectable view of the text.

I was initially selecting a whole lot of text and couldn’t get it to work properly. Now, I just hover the mouse arrow over the bit of text I want and it grabs it. The nice thing I have found, sdoing this post, is that if it is an active link, it copies to URL as well .

Once its grabbed the text you see it highlighted, then you just Ctrl + V to where you  want to use it.

I have found it grabs a lot of text/fields that you normally couldn’t get at. The only way to see if this is useful to you is to try it out. I will definitely keep it activated.

LabelControl

LabelControl is a AutoHotKey tool.  Someone mentioned it as a comment in the Taskbar Numberer post. Its default .exe file lets you hold the CTRL key down and it displays numbers in the area (desktop, programme window that is active and part of the taskbar (only the windows icons part such as Start/Search/TaskView/Show Hidden Icons/Speakers …., but not the Taskbar Icons that the user puts on the taskbar)

You keep the CTRL key down and the numbers show, keeping the Ctrl key down still, you type the number, then let go of the CTRL key and that numbered item becomes active, so that your next action is related to that item. There is a setting that automatically moves the mouse item over the active point.

In the downloadable zip file it has a .EXE file and a .AKH so I tried to change the CTRL key to the SHFT key (As I am using the CTRL key for a lot of things) and it only partially worked.

It is an interesting idea but too many keys being pressed and in a specific sequence. A nice idea but not for me.

FreeFileSync

FreeFileSync: Open Source File Synchronization & Backup Software.

I have some storage on MyCloud device at home that I have connected to my PC. I usually just do a backup once in a while to it with an external drive.

When I set up OneDrive I found it was constantly trying to sync folders and do all sorts of things with files , as in File Explorer it pops up quite high in the file list so erroneously was moving files to oneDrive when I thought I was moving them on my PC. I found that so annoying that I disabled oneDrive, although it still shows up. So that put me off the sync file system.

I’m getting a bit more disciplined with storing specific files in folders that I’m working on, and previously I would have tried to sync all my project folders instead of the active one, so that caused the system to work continuously in the background, slowing my PC down. So this time around I’ll try a free version of folder sync and start on just a couple of folders and see how that goes.

End comment

Of the tools above I will definitely be using MyFolder. It works in with the way I work at the moment, so just extends options on right click context menu. Hopefully this will give me some ideas on other tools to use PyWinContext to add to that too.

Textify was useful in this post for grabbing text and URL at the same time for links. I can also see a lot of other occasions where I can use it. An example of this would be information text above an input filed in a pop up message box. I have had occasion to try and grab this text but in the end have given up in frustration. I think this tool will grab it. Playing around on this web post I am able to grab the text off a button (and the underlying code associated with that button).

Another article  12 Free Windows Productivity Apps You Should Download also mentioned SimpleOCR. This is a Optical Character Recognition programme that I would have considered except that I’m using Google Keep that has this built into it and I’m using that across my devices already.

https://freefilesync.org/