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Quick Templates - usability
 
Hi, I like the ability to use quick templates, they are very powerful, and theyre one of the reasons I purchased The Bat.

Im starting to use more and more of them, and Im noticiing theyre becoming a little cumbersome to organise.

Just a few questions...

Please could you consider, in future versions, the ability to arrange quick templates into an hierarchy. These could appear as cascading menu items on the quick templates button, and allow me to organise templates into categories (at the moment the list is unordered and its quick difficult to find the template you want).

Imagine someone offering email technical support, customer service etc. A lot of the replies are mundane and repetetive. The templates are ideal for this, but it would be nice to seperate these two things into groups of templates. Ok, I think you get the idea :)


Another suggestion/question:

When creating a new quick template, I dont understand the purpose of the 'Handle' field. It seems as though its just a way to force the user to type a unique ID into there, to help the Bat to organise templates.
My question is, why cant The Bat just generate an internal ID, and hide that field from the interface?
Then the quick templates menu could simply show the description. The handle always looks ugly, and I think this would make for an easier user experience, and also a cleaner interface

I hope you dont see this as nitpicking. Im still very pleased with The Bat and the power it offers.

Thanks

Paul















 
Quote
I dont understand the purpose of the 'Handle' field.

Remember one of your handles, type it in the editor and press Ctrl-space. You'll see that the Quick Template (QT) is executed.
Another way to execute a QT is from another template with the %QInclude(handle) macro with 'handle' being the handle of the QT you want to execute.
If TB would set the handles by itself, it would be more difficult to remember the handle you'd need.


Quote
Please could you consider, in future versions, the ability to arrange quick templates into an hierarchy.

You could create those categories yourself by using creative naming of handles. Lets say you've got two main sets of QTs. Support and Sales.
Just start the names of your support QTs with 'supp-' and your sales QTs with 'sale-'.
This would result in names like supp-pop, supp-smtp, supp-general, sale-single, sale-multi, sale-soldout.
As the editor-menu in Tools->Insert->Insert QT-> sorts your QTs alphabetically you'll have them sorted.
But this naming system will make it easier to call the names by just typing them too. Create a couple of supp- handles and type supp- followed by Ctrl-space, TB will offer you to pick a QT but starts with the first template that has 'supp-' in its handle or description (that's where the dash comes in handy, as that makes it easier use use sequences in handles that won't be used in descriptions).

If tis isn't enough for you, you should know that isn't the place to go for feature requests as this is mainly a peer to peer support forum for end-users like you and me.

You can insert wishes in the wish list, by logging in to:
https://www.ritlabs.com/bt/main_page.php
Choose 'The Bat! wishes' and add a new item.
First check whether someone has made the same wish, then you can
support that wish.
Wishes that are supported by more users are more likely to be granted
than wishes by one. And the system isn't smart enough to understand
that wishes might be the same.
And add just one wish per entry. Makes everything easier, both for
other users who want to add support and for the developers.


__________________________________
I'm just a user of The Bat! I don't work for Ritlabs.
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