quick files, recent files, and recent folders

Simple menu application providing access to frequently used files/folders/urls and the Windows recently used files and folders list.

Requires win32all

(c) 2008 Daniel J. Rocco Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/

Download the archive

Introduction

These python scripts utilize a basic Windows menu library (quick_menu.py) to provide menu-based access to a list of frequently used files—stored in a text file—and the list of recently used files or folders maintained by Windows. While not explicitly a voice-recognition application, these utilities use the native Windows menu widgets and are therefore automatically voice-activated.

Here is an example menu; note that you can either say the name of the menu item ("drive root") or the numerical hotkey ("1").

The next example demonstrates menu access to the Windows list of recently used files:

Setup

1. Unzip the archive to your favorite folder. Any folder will do, but the current path setup assumes C:\documents\voice\. If you use a different folder, you will need to edit quick_files.py and the recent_folders shortcut to reflect your installation path.

2. Edit the quick files list (quick_files_list.txt) to reflect the files/folders/URLs you would like quick access to. The included example file demonstrates the list syntax; each line can be one of:

1. a menu definition, which consists of a descriptive name followed by a tab followed by the item's path. The path can be a normal filesystem path, a UNC path, or a URL.
2. the keyword separator, which places a menu separator in the menu at that position.
3. a blank line or a line starting with '#' which are ignored

3. Add voice commands to allow you to run the scripts. How you do this will vary depending on your system configuration. I use the following commands in my Vocola global commands list:

### quick/recent folders
quick files                 = ShellExecute ("C:\Program Files\Python25\pythonw.exe C:\documents\voice\quick_files.py");
recent folders              = ShellExecute ("C:\documents\voice\recent_folders.lnk");
recent (documents | files)  = ShellExecute ("C:\documents\voice\recent_documents.lnk");

Don't forget to update the paths to reflect your filesystem setup.

To Do List

• better documentation
• clean up file/path handling
• setting log file to None should disable logging
• better exception handling