how to compare custom actions?

[babag]

i need to find an easy way to compare and find differences between multiple custom actions.

i often make a series of custom actions, all identical, save for one element being changed. what happens in practice is that i end up mostly using just one or a few out of the full series on a regular basis. in the heat of a project i sometimes find an adjustment i need to make to one of these custom actions. i make that adjustment but fail to follow through in a timely manner by conforming the rest of the series due to time constraints and, as time goes on, i forget about it.

later, i realize the changes but can't remember which in the series have the adjustments and which don't. the way i've thought i could check them against each other would be to print the list of actions that comprise the custom action. if i could do that, i could put them up side by side in a text editor to see what actions were missing. i don't see a way to print the actions as a list, though.

anyone know how to do this?

thanks,
babag

[IrishRover79]

Hi, I don't know if there's an easy way to print the list of actions included in a custom action (short of printing a screenshot) but you can certainly open multiple instances of the 'edit custom action' window simultaneously. That should allow you easily to compare what included in different actions.

If you want to test adjustments to custom actions, you can create a duplicate with the same name and '(Copy)' at the end by right-clicking on the action in the action list and choosing duplicate. That allows you to fiddle with your custom action without losing your original version.

[xpander]

There is an easy way to get a list of what actions a specific custom action is made of. In the Actions list, open the right-click menu over the given custom action and select Copy selected action text from the menu. Then paste that into a text editor.

If you on the other hand would want to see which custom actions would have a specific action in them, you could do a search in reaper-kb.ini file. All custom actions and key bindings are saved into the reaper-kb.ini file at the root of Reaper resources. You can get there from Options/Show REAPER resource path in explorer/finder...

So what you could do is to make a backup copy of that file. Then open it in a text editor. Here's an example line from mine:

ACT 0 0 "6c3b6fc7c1021944920d105aa5b435da" "Custom: Select empty space between items" 41110 40417 40626 40416 41174 40625

The Command ID of that custom action is inside the first quote marks. Then follows the name of the custom action. And finally you get the command IDs of all the individual actions that are in that custom action. They are in the same order they appear in that custom action.

So you could e.g. search your custom action by its name and copy the command ID sequence of all the actions included. Then search the same actions by their command IDs in the Actions list.

[babag]

thanks for the ideas.

@irishrover79
i just discovered that i could have multiple action editors open. who knew? only ever used it one at a time. they do start to take up a lot of screen space, though, as the left panel isn't really needed for this purpose, at least on the reference one. i did wind up using a screen capture as reference for the time being. i did know about duplicating for testing purposes and use it for testing large custom actions that might have 20-30 sub-actions. thanks.

@xpander
yeah, the kb.ini is something i've dealt with before. that's too cumbersome of a workflow, though, because, as you noted, the included sub-actions are not mentioned by name, just number. that means cross-referencing, which gets to be too much trouble. i actually wrote and posted some scripting in the linux forum for parsing the kb.ini file to produce a txt file listing things about custom actions. that was a lot of work, though. was hoping there would be something simple and more native, like a 'print list' function for the editor window.

for now, i guess, it's multiple action windows or screen caps.

edit:
here's the thread from the linux forum with the script. it lists what custom actions an action is used in:

https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=250396


thanks again,
babag