# Preferences - Actions

Use monospace font for Action Editor statement display will cause a fixed width font to be used when displaying action statements.

Action editor windows have the option of displaying line numbers before statements. The line numbers can globally be enabled or disabled from any Action Editor window's statement list context menu. You have the option of changing the appearance via the Display a vertical grid line between line numbers and statements option.

A warning will be issued whenever an action field which requires a named variable, contains an escaped named variable sequence. While this is not an invalid scenario, it is not typical. The warnings can be disabled when issued and reenabled by doing a Reset Warnings from the Yate menu. The Display warnings for potential incorrect named variable usage setting provides a means of re-enabling the setting without having to reset all warnings.

You can choose three different backgrounds for the list of statements in the statement panel.

You can configure how dates are displayed in the Action Manager by supplying a template. An empty template assumes the Yate default. An * will display the system's short date for all days except today, when the system's short time will be displayed. A modified template is only applied the next time the Action Manager is opened. You can open the Action Manager or force a redisplay via the Display button. Templates are composed as described in Unicode Technical Standard #35. While there are many evolutions of this specification the differences for how you would construct the templates here should be equivalent. However for completeness you can find the relevant specifications utilized by different OS X versions here:

> 10.6

> 10.7

> 10.8

> 10.9 and we assume later

As an extension Yate allows you to separate a template into a description for dates in today and one for all dates not in today. The | character is used as a separator as follows:

> today's template|other days' template

### Examples:

> Yate default (ISO 8601)
>   yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss
> Today as hours(12), minutes, seconds, am or pm. Other as year, month, day
>   hh:mm:ss a|yyyy-MM-dd

You can choose a variety of different backgrounds for the Action Manager's statement list panel.

You can set the text color for the prompt text in the Action Pending window. This only affects prompts automatically issued by action functions. It does not affect prompts manually issued.

Yate uses unique values for Album and Track Database IDs. It also allows you to generate these values via the \U escape sequence. Historically, Yate used its own form of unique value. If you are using Yate on more than one Mac, the pattern is unique as long as both Macs have the correct time and you are not running more than one version of Yate at a time. The format of the pattern is number.number{+number}. The current default is to use a UUID which is a more standard 128 bit value. Alternately you can also choose to produce a GUS (Globally Unique String) which is a wider form of a UUID. There is no reason to change the default value unless you have a personal preference for one of the other types of unique values. Note that as Yate always uses string compares when comparing unique values, mixing and matching the unique value types will not have a detrimental effect due to the different representations of the values. You can temporarily override this setting in actions by using the Preferences action statement.

By default the Ask statement displays Cancel, True and False buttons. You can assign different labels to the True and False buttons. eg. Yes and No. Note that the meaning of the buttons is fixed and cannot be changed. The middle button always implies True, while the rightmost button always implies False.

Earlier versions of Yate maintained a completely isolated instance of an action test state for each action. This meant that the test state could never be returned. Current versions of the application treat the test state as a single entity which is only automatically set to False when a UI based action first starts and whenever a new folder is processed by the Batch Processor. You can switch back to the older method by selecting Unique action test state for every action from the Action test State mode option.

It is possible to have an action run automatically when you save files. See Automatically Running an Action When Saving Files for more information.

If a default action has been specified in the Action Manager, it will be run whenever files are dragged to the dock icon or opened via the Finder's Open With command. You can disable the running of the default action if Yate is already open via the Only run the default action if Yate is not already open setting.