I now have more than 600 rules in my "My Rules" directory. They are organized in sub directories for convenience. Unfortunately this requires the frequent changing of the "Your Rules" pointer in Preferences/Control. Rule management would be a lot easier if Golly searched the directory pointed to in "Your Rules" and all of its sub directories when looking for a rule.
Brian Prentice
Rule Management
Re: Rule Management
(Sorry for the very late reply!)
I'd have to say that such a feature is unlikely to be implemented, at least by me (but Golly is open source...). It would require quite a lot of code changes to support this on all platforms, especially to do it efficiently. I once wrote code to do sub-directory file searching for one of my Mac apps (OzTeX) and it wasn't much fun. In Golly's case I just don't see much benefit to be gained (and it would definitely need to be an optional feature in case there are people already using subdirs for other purposes).
Note that there is a Python command you can use to set the rules directory:
golly.setdir("rules", "/path/to/my-rules/subdir1/")
So maybe you could write a few scripts for switching directories, or maybe just one script that created a list of all the desired subdirs in the Help window where each subdir is a link that runs another script which calls the appropriate setdir command. That would be a lot quicker than using Prefs > Control.
I'd have to say that such a feature is unlikely to be implemented, at least by me (but Golly is open source...). It would require quite a lot of code changes to support this on all platforms, especially to do it efficiently. I once wrote code to do sub-directory file searching for one of my Mac apps (OzTeX) and it wasn't much fun. In Golly's case I just don't see much benefit to be gained (and it would definitely need to be an optional feature in case there are people already using subdirs for other purposes).
Note that there is a Python command you can use to set the rules directory:
golly.setdir("rules", "/path/to/my-rules/subdir1/")
So maybe you could write a few scripts for switching directories, or maybe just one script that created a list of all the desired subdirs in the Help window where each subdir is a link that runs another script which calls the appropriate setdir command. That would be a lot quicker than using Prefs > Control.