Many Tricks
One of the new features in Name Mangler 3 is a comprehensive history of renaming operations. Name Mangler will remember your last 50 (or more, if you change it in prefs) renaming actions. You can access these saved configurations via our history browser:
To make it easier to browse your history, we provide two keyboard shortcuts: Command-Left Arrow (previous configuration) and Command-Right Arrow (next configuration). Experienced keyboard users will instantly recognize that those are the shortcut keys for jumping to the start and end of text strings in an input box, and may wonder how we have the keys serving both roles.
The short answer is “we don’t.” In Name Mangler 3, you can’t use those shortcut keys to navigate input boxes, only to navigate history.
But there is an easy solution, for those who prefer these keys in their text field roles: change the keyboard shortcuts for the history browser. After changing these shortcuts, the Command plus arrow key shortcuts will work as expected in Name Mangler’s text fields.
If you’re experienced with changing OS X keyboard shortcuts, you just need to assign Previous Configuration and Next Configuration to new shortcuts, and you’re done. If you need more specific how-to help, keep reading.
To reassign keyboard shortcuts for an app in OS X, open System Preferences (Name Mangler can remain running), and go to the Keyboard pane. On the Keyboard pane, click the Keyboard Shortcuts tab, click on Application Shortcuts at the bottom left of the window, then click the plus sign at the bottom of the window:
This will drop down a sheet with three fields on it: Application, Menu Title, and Keyboard Shortcut. Click the Application drop-down menu, and look for Name Mangler (or Name Mangler 3, if you’re using the App Store version) in the list. If you don’t see it, click Other and navigate to the app on your hard drive.
In the Menu Title field, type Previous Configuration, and in the Keyboard Shortcut field, type whatever you’d like it to be—Command-Option-Left Arrow, for example. Once you have the panel configured, click Add to save your changes and return to the Keyboard Shortcuts screen.
Click the plus sign once more and repeat the process, but change the Menu Title field to Next Configuration, and assign it different keys (Command-Option-Right Arrow), then click Add.
When you’re done, the Keyboard Shortcuts panel will look something like this:
And that’s all there is to it. When you return to Name Mangler, Command plus arrow keys will work in text fields, and your newly-assigned shortcuts will be used to navigate history.