vertigo220
commented
2 years ago Big +1 on wildcards especially. * and ? use are bizarrely missing here, which makes little sense considering the apparent design philosophy of PowerRename. By all accounts, based on its design and comments I've seen here, it's meant as a fairly basic yet moderately powerful renamer, not quite as powerful as many others but with a much simpler UI. I've been using it for what should be very quick renaming tasks, as it seems that's what it's geared toward (i.e. making a single, simple change versus multiple and/or complex changes, in which case I use another program), with the idea that it will be quicker than using something else, but I often find it to actually be slower and more complicated, partially due to its overly simplistic UI, and partially due to the lack of basic functionality that would make it much faster to use.
The use of wildcards is just one such example of this. A bit earlier, I tried to do what should have been a very quick task, taking a few seconds to accomplish, by putting "*" (without quotes) in the search box and "jpg" in the replace box and selecting apply to extensions only. This should have been all that was necessary, being both easy and fast, to rename the file extensions, but it didn't do anything, because of the lack of basic wildcards. Yes, I can use regex to accomplish this, but that shouldn't be necessary, and most users won't know how. In fact, I'd argue that most users are going to likely have little knowledge and may not even be able to (easily) do such a task even with basic wildcards, and a wizard or at least a dropdown with different tasks (e.g. rename extension in this case) could be implemented to assist them in setting things up for a given task.
Another renaming task I often use this for is to add some text to the end of multiple files. Again, this should be as simple as selecting the file in explorer, right-clicking them and selecting PowerRename, and typing the text to append (or prepend if that's the case) in the replace box and selecting append/prepend from a dropdown, or alternately an option to add at a certain position at which point the user can enter a position or select beginning/end or prepend/append. This is, I believe, what @Thescorps meant by "digits from left/right" and it is a basic function in every renamer I've used and greatly simplifies things, as opposed to having to use regex, which most don't know how to do and, even for those that do, can be more cumbersome and slower, especially for adding text at a specific position not at the beginning or end.
Again, I've been using PowerRename a good bit in order to try it out, but every time I use it, I find myself thinking I could do what I'm doing faster and easier with a different program, despite it being more complicated, because it's more versatile and powerful. PowerRename seems to be at odds with itself, trying to be so "simple" that it ends up being more difficult and time-consuming to use as a result. Just looking at the number of issues requesting various functions to perform these basic tasks is proof, to me, of this.
Thescorps
Ste1io
Jay-o-Way
jaimecbernardo
stefansjfw
Description of the new feature / enhancement
Improved string pattern matching for PowerRename
Wildcards, digits from left/right, Sentence case, user filter list (all CAPS conventions), cycle through all conditions until they are changed, auto close when complete, allow only one instance, file HERE when done.....
Scenario when this would be used?
Everytime we use PowerRename
Supporting information
No response