I'm musing about how happy I am with my
AutoHotkey solution for switching from one set of filters to another, and wondering how others cope without this. I thought it about time I suggest a "filter preset" feature—so all can enjoy this capability. But it seems I've already mentioned it...
BTW, if any new filters are added, it will become really obvious we need some way to save and recall filter settings. Ironically, I have programmed my remote to do this (e.g., so I can switch between "unseen movies available for viewing" and "unseen episodes available for viewing"), but there is no way to do this in the program. Perhaps this could be implemented by having a Save settings command on the filter menu. This would save the current settings and prompt for a name (e.g. "unseen available movies"). This would then appear on the menu (or perhaps a submenu, along with Reset filters). Or, it might be preferable just to provide for the configuration of such a "filter preset" submenu in Preferences (since there would have to be a way to delete, edit and rearrange the menu items anyway).
I was avoiding the comical aspect of my solution by saying, "I have programmed my remote to do this." It's actually a set of AHK scripts, each of which animate the mouse to change the filter settings using the menu. The remote just sends the hotkey for the desired script. It goofy, but functional and fun to watch. More importantly,
I can no longer imagine using the program without it. So I think others would find the equivalent program feature equally useful.
While I don't use them as often, some of my scripts not only set filters, but also group and sort. One, for example, displays movies by date viewed. Another groups movies not yet viewed by genre. So if it's not too complicated to implement, maybe the feature should be for "filter/view" presets. It would be cool to be able to simply select a menu item to "save current filter and view settings." A preferences dialog could then be used to copy the "last saved" settings to a preset, give the preset a name (that would appear on the "preset menu") and to assign a hotkey to each preset (essential if the preset is to be invoked by remote). The new preset menu would then include:
- Reset filter and view settings
- Save current filter and view settings
- Preset 0 = Last settings saved
- Preset 1
- Preset 2
- ...
Perhaps the hotkeys could be configured by selecting some combination of Ctrl, Alt, Win and Shift, and then they would be that plus R, S, 0, 1, ..., 9 (e.g.,
Ctrl+Alt+R to reset).
