I’m using a program called Macro Express. It’s very useful.
Now, if you keep reading, it’s because you are experienced in macros design or general programming.
How can I make a macro to open directly the Folder Options applet, and choosing “do not show hidden folders” option?
I mean, when I try to record the mouse clicks, it behave strangely, and shows all the process anyway. What I’m looking for is some kind of tweaking macro to turn off the showing of hidden folders directly.
Because if I decide to activate it when there’s people around, they wouldn’t know what happened. It’s the same distinction between a clipboard paste and a text type speed.
Try out QuicKeys. It’s absolutely the bee’s knees on MacOS 7-8-9, it’s a damn good macro program under Windows 2K-XP, pretty decent under Windows 95-98-ME, and after an initially pathetic start it’s finally getting pretty impressive under MacOS X too.
Any macro you make will go through the process, if not very fast. This is because it’s just recording your mouse movements and clicks.
Instead of using the Show/Hide hidden folders, why not create a batch file to hide/unhide the folders? That way, ‘Do not show hidden folders’ will ALWAYS be checked and you don’t need to worry about it. You would just run a quick batch file to change the attributes on a folder from hidden to unhidden and back again.
Create another text file named unhide.reg and paste in the same text except with a dword value of 1 instead of 2.
Make a text file named hide.bat. Enter the text regedit.exe /s c:\hide.reg (or whatever the correct path is). Make unhide.bat with the same command but pointing to unhide.reg. Make desktop shortcuts to each of these .bat files (Note: the shortcuts must be placed on the desktop). Right-click them, hit Properties and put the desired key combination in the Shortcut key field.
This should allow you to switch hidden folders on or off with keyboard shortcuts.
Not really, QuicKeys is more sophisticated than that. You click “Record” and do it manually and click the “Done” button, and what it has recorded as events is:
Select Menu [“view”, “folder options”]
Wait for Window [optional specify name] to appear
Window Selector [“Folder Options”]
Mouse Click [x, y coordinates of “Show hidden files” radio button, from upper left corner of active window, optional specify window name]
Button Click [“Apply”]
Button Click [“OK”]
On playback, it sends instructions to the OS that are more precise and much faster than “move the mouse here…now click…now drag down to this x, y coordinate…now release mouse button”. In the above recorded sequence, only the clicking of the checkbox option “show hidden files” is rendered as a mouse click or movement; the rest is menu commands or button clicks. On playback you get a brief flash, long enough to get the sense that a window was invoked and appeared, but it’s gone before you can read anything. And because the event it is issuing is based on things like “select that menu item” or "click the button labeled “such-and-such”, it plays back correctly even if you’ve changed resolution or added an auxiliary second monitor or something.
This is on QK 2.01 for Windows. By now QK-Win may directly support “Show hidden files in current window” / “Do not show hidden files in current window” as a single command.