Keyboard-centric Navigation of the Modern Script Workplace

Lounge (Discussions)
1

I confess to having a luddite streak. If the older version does what I want it to, and the newer version changes behaviors in which my fingers have memorized the old ways, why should I be using the most modern release?

Well, this year's client consultation gigs and temporary full employment gig have yanked me out of my old-ScriptMaker™ shell.

Is it just my lack of familiarity with a scripting environment that by all rights I should be well-used to by now, or has Claris/FileMaker made it well nigh impossible to touch-type one's way through a script? How the bloody hell does one make "Specify Field" pop up when invoking a Set Field without reaching for the mouse? How does one invoke the "Specify Calculated Value" part? How does one move a script step up above the script steps, or move it down below existing ones?

I've developed in 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 on various occasions (cussing the whole damn time) but prior to 2017 I was most often able to keep using rickety old 13 and the ScriptMaker (umm, Manage Scripts'er??) for the twelvefold speed increase I'd get from being in an environment where I could create script steps nearly as fast as I could think of them.

2

Which OS are you hacking old-timer?

3

Native is Mac 10.11.6, with everything between 10.6.8 and 11.0.2 available in Parallels, along with Windows 7 and 10 and a boatload of older legacy Windows. The keyboard nav that matters most is Mac.

4

On the mac, most actions can be performed with the space bar, arrow keys and the enter key.

To exit dialogs, with the default button, on my laptop I hit the Return key instead of the enter key. In some circumstances that just acts like a return key and I have to hit fn-return to exit the dialog.

Are you taking advantage of type-ahead abbreviations? For script steps, type the first character of each word, e.g., GTRR for Go To Related Record. For function Names, the same thing. For instance, Get( FoundCount) is "g" return "fc" return.

2 Likes
5

Thanks, I'm going to go experiment!

6

You installed MBS FileMaker Plugin and tried our enhancements there?

see