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Shortcut to rename selected layer. (Sorry, but it's getting embarrassing)


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Just now, R C-R said:

If you could adapt that script to running through the list of all layers to find names matching specified criteria & replace/amend those names with specified replacements, it could be very useful!

That's certainly possible. But it's slightly over my late-at-night scripting skills.
But I'll keep that in mind and look into it. I already have a few old search/replace scripts for iView/Expression Media with all the necessary hooks, dialog windows etc. that I could reuse here.

11 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Try it when no layer is currently selected.

Simple: Select All as a starting point.

Or CLICK! :D 

MacBookAir 15": MacOS Ventura > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // MacBookPro 15" mid-2012: MacOS El Capitan > Affinity v1 / MacOS Catalina > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // iPad 8th: iPadOS 16 > Affinity v2

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24 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Try it when no layer is currently selected. ☹️

It's ok to click ONE time in order to select a layer. The important thing is that after that first click I don't have to click again for every layer.

About the navigation in and out of layers and groups: there are solutions for that too. And actually Affinity is already using one to get the parent of an object, could do the same in the other direction.

It's also very easy to find appropriate UX flows, because this feature is a standard in many softwares (for example Clip Studio Paint and Blender have it).

About the need for it and how urgent it is. Well, for professional work in some domains, it's pretty important. I develop videogames and I am working on a project with around 800 elements, that I'll need to name. Just that single task is a pain without keyboard navigation and renaming.

Same thing for elements inside an object. I would rename that with pleasure, if I could do it by keyboard. (Actually "paste name" would be a great add, because Affinity already has a lot of specific "paste").

What I am saying is that of course you won't need it if you do single small projects, because you won't rename many layers, maybe 10 during the whole session. But if you are working on massive projects, it would be extremely useful.

So if Affinity aspires to become an industry standard, they should really start adding this kind of productivity features.

Imho of course.

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13 minutes ago, loukash said:

Simple: Select All as a starting point.

Try that with 25 or 50 layers when the layer you want to name/rename is 20 or more layers deep in the stack! Or try it when the layer you want is nested a few levels deep in a group, Layer container, clipped into another layer, etc.

It would be tedious at best for anything more than very simple layer stacks.

Again, I really do not see this being very useful very often to very many users. What I do see as being very, very useful is a real scripting interface, so that is something I would much rather see them focus on implementing.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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3 minutes ago, AlessioFB said:

What I am saying is that of course you won't need it if you do single small projects, because you won't rename many layers, maybe 10 during the whole session. But if you are working on massive projects, it would be extremely useful.

Actually, for the reasons I have already stated, I think it would be useful only for small projects with just a few layers. Imagine trying to use next/previous to work your way through a very deep layer stack to get to some specific layer, then invoke the rename shortcut, & finally start typing in a new name or editing an existing one.

Some things are just way quicker with a mouse than a keyboard.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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25 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Actually, for the reasons I have already stated, I think it would be useful only for small projects with just a few layers. Imagine trying to use next/previous to work your way through a very deep layer stack to get to some specific layer, then invoke the rename shortcut, & finally start typing in a new name or editing an existing one.

Some things are just way quicker with a mouse than a keyboard.

Sorry, I don't agree. The navigation through complex hierarchies is quite easier than your depiction of it:

for example, you expand a group (or layer, or nested, or whatever) with arrow right and close it with arrow left. Use up and down arrow to move up and down, if a group is open you go down in depth (children) otherwise you continue.

There are standards already, that I use in more complex software. For example, a scene in Unity (Game Engine) gets VERY complex and nested very quick, but I can can navigate through it and rename everything without touching the mouse once.

I am not suggesting something new in the industry, I am just suggesting to implement something I consider fairly basic.

 

Also, the case scenario you suggested is where you have to change ONE object and you have to navigate TO it. Of course in this case the mouse is a better option.

I am talking about a scenario where I want to rename 50 objects in the next 5 minutes. They are in a row, every step in navigation is just one "move forward" away. Very easy to reach. In this case, to have to double click 50 times, moving the hand away from the keyboard, doubles the time needed and multiplies frustration by ten.

 

This said, I also find a real scripting interface very useful, so I am totally on your side on this. (But that's a way more complex feature to implement, imho).

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Scripting? Who hates themselves that much? How about just having it handy in the program. It is not unusual to have a ton of similar objects side by side in a group, no more unusual scenario than that power duplicate may have been used for it (or spray or maybe advanced duplicate in a real vector program).

I routinely bulk rename objects a lot in other vector programs, it can be (and should be) this easy:

mouse.gif.bd0581c6ff57613fee4be58fd9d304ee.gif 

 1) You have completely wrecked the layers panel, Serif.

2) I recommend Reddit groups instead of this forum. Not the same few bot-like users replying to everything, a wider representation of users, fewer fanboys, more qualified users. In short, better!

3) I was here to report bugs and submit improvement requests for professional work professionally in a large setup and to bring a lot of knowledge from the world, i.e. professional product development, web- and software development, usability, user experience design and accessibility. I actually know what I am talking about!

BUT! We are phasing out Designer and Affinity in 2022 Q1 - and replacing it with feature complete and algorithmically competent alternatives.
Publisher is unsuitable for serious use, and was never adopted.

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2 hours ago, AlessioFB said:

for example, you expand a group (or layer, or nested, or whatever) with arrow right and close it with arrow left. Use up and down arrow to move up and down, if a group is open you go down in depth (children) otherwise you continue.

That does not work for me. For instance, if I have a group selected the right, left, up, & down arrow keys move (nudge) it, not open or close the group.

2 hours ago, AlessioFB said:

I am talking about a scenario where I want to rename 50 objects in the next 5 minutes.

OK, but as I said, I do not think that is something most Affinity users would be doing very often, if at all.

That said, I imagine things like that are among the many 'batch' tasks that could most efficiently be done with a scripting engine, so I would prefer they concentrate on developing that rather than adding a bunch more keyboard shortcut options. Ideally, the apps would come with a lot of predefined scripts for things like this, including conditionals so for example we could do things like find every instance of a particular string & replace it with another, ignore layers that already have a name or affect only certain types of layers, & so on.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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  • Staff

We could look at adding rename layer as a misc. shortcut available to set if anyone wants to. Should say too on Windows in V2 we added the ability after changing a layer name that tab would automatically take you to the next layer to rename which certainly helps massively when renaming a lot of layers. For some reason that didn't get added to macOS which we will get sorted!

Managing Director

Help make our apps better by joining our beta program!


MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2021) / Apple M1 Max / 64GB / macOS 12.0.1

iPad Pro 11-inch 3rd Gen / iPadOS 16.2

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5 hours ago, Ash said:

We could look at adding rename layer as a misc. shortcut available to set if anyone wants to. Should say too on Windows in V2 we added the ability after changing a layer name that tab would automatically take you to the next layer to rename which certainly helps massively when renaming a lot of layers. For some reason that didn't get added to macOS which we will get sorted!

OMG I had completely missed this new feature in V2! This is already a GREAT improvement! (It solves 70% of the problem I was referring too). Thank you so much (and thanks the devs) for this. 🙏

Sadly I am still using V1 for the big project, because V2 still has a lot of issues. Is there any possibility to implement that feature in V1 too? Is that compatible? (I know the UI has been changed deeply).

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Selecting the next layer in rename mode automatically will interfere massively (select another layer out of the blue) with single layer renaming which is probably the most common use case - a great example of why usability specialists should provide (and test) possible solutions to these issues and workflows.

Can you at least consider a shortcut (alt + Enter for example) to a multi rename mode instead so it is not default behavior.

Your idea has advantages over the one I posted above if the layers should have totally different names. Bulk renaming is superiour in other scenarios.

 1) You have completely wrecked the layers panel, Serif.

2) I recommend Reddit groups instead of this forum. Not the same few bot-like users replying to everything, a wider representation of users, fewer fanboys, more qualified users. In short, better!

3) I was here to report bugs and submit improvement requests for professional work professionally in a large setup and to bring a lot of knowledge from the world, i.e. professional product development, web- and software development, usability, user experience design and accessibility. I actually know what I am talking about!

BUT! We are phasing out Designer and Affinity in 2022 Q1 - and replacing it with feature complete and algorithmically competent alternatives.
Publisher is unsuitable for serious use, and was never adopted.

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  • 1 month later...

Naming layers needs to be easier.

Here are my proposed solutions:
- Add menu item for changing layer name. (Layer > Rename Layer)
- Double clicking artboard label should allow changing of name.

image.png.c9c958a5a6f5c1771efd84b084fe9a8e.png

- Allow binding a keyboard shortcut for changing layer name.

→MacOS (Latest), M1 Max Mac Studio, Designer

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  • 2 weeks later...

Another reason renaming layers is currently difficult - it takes 2 sets of double clicks to edit the name in the layer panel. So, four total clicks.

If I had a shortcut, I could select a layer, tap 'R' and begin typing. Easy.

→MacOS (Latest), M1 Max Mac Studio, Designer

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1 hour ago, Rudantu said:

If I had a shortcut, I could select a layer, tap 'R' and begin typing. Easy.

aff_km_macro_click_layer_name.png.c2aa60143e0c19ec8a0634eee43fd5d6.png

My AppleScript for v1 on previous page works pretty well, but something has changed in the v2 UI hierarchy so that it's not possible to target the Layers panel by its ID like in «set myScrollArea to first scroll area of splitter group 1 whose value of attribute "AXIdentifier" is "_NS:239"», and it's not possible to "set focused of myField to true". The script for v2 is more "generic" and required adding Keyboard Maestro actions to move the mouse and click at a specific location. I'm still not very happy with it although for me it usually works:

-- CLICK AFFINITY 2 LAYER NAME AppleScript
-- © 2022-2023 loukash.com
-- v1.0.2.2b1 2022-12-08
-- requires Keyboard Maestro
-- https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/171540-shortcut-to-rename-selected-layer-sorry-but-its-getting-embarrassing/&do=findComment&comment=1010355
tell application "System Events"
	-- where are we?
	set applicationName to name of first application process whose frontmost is true
	-- check for V2:
	set appString to words of applicationName
	if item 1 of appString = "Affinity" and item 3 of appString = "2" then
		-- else the script will simply silently quit:
		try
			tell process applicationName
				tell window 1
					-- identifying the Layers panel with ID "_NS:291":
					set myScrollArea to first scroll area of splitter group 1 --whose value of attribute "AXIdentifier" is "_NS:291"
					-- the topmost selected object on canvas = topmost selected layer in Layers panel:
					set myRow to first row of table 1 of myScrollArea whose selected is true
					-- every layer object has a static text:
					set myField to static text 1 of UI element 1 of myRow
					-- find its position relative to window 1:
					set myClick to position of myField -- xy list
					set xPosition to item 1 of myClick
					set yPosition to item 2 of myClick
					-- slight offset to click:
					set clickPosition to {xPosition + 8, yPosition + 8}
					-- send the click position to KM variable:
					return clickPosition
					-- in KM: Save to variable > clickPosition
					-- next KM actions:
					-- Use Variable "click Position" > to set mouse location
					-- Move and Double Click at 0,0 from Current Mouse Location
				end tell
			end tell
		end try
	end if
end tell

But to rename an artboard, all I need is to click the artboard name on the canvas or select it by other means, then press my ctrl-shif-L shortcut and type away.

MacBookAir 15": MacOS Ventura > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // MacBookPro 15" mid-2012: MacOS El Capitan > Affinity v1 / MacOS Catalina > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // iPad 8th: iPadOS 16 > Affinity v2

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  • 3 weeks later...
  • Staff

Hi - pleased to say we've now added "rename layer..." to the layer menu, allowing you to assign a shortcut key if you wish in the 2.1 beta which is now available. We have also sorted out the tab behaviour to quickly rename layers in sequence. It would be great if you wanted to try it out in the beta and let us know what you think - you can sign up to the beta program here.

 

Managing Director

Help make our apps better by joining our beta program!


MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2021) / Apple M1 Max / 64GB / macOS 12.0.1

iPad Pro 11-inch 3rd Gen / iPadOS 16.2

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