Add extended attributes
Add extended attributes
If there isn’t a blank window already open, open one using the New menu command. Click on the Open button on that window to select a file (or folder) to open and add/edit its attributes.
When you open an item, any metadata already contained in those five extended attributes will be displayed in their respective text boxes. You can then edit those metadata until you are happy with them. These extended attributes are best with short text content, although they will work with more than 100 KB of text in each.
⚠️ If you leave a text box empty, that extended attribute will not be written to the file when you save changes.
To break lines in the text boxes, press Option-Enter . You can cut, copy, and paste text in the text boxes as you would expect, but styling is not supported: the attributes only store plain not styled text.
⚠️ When you Save changes, the text which you have entered is converted into XML format before writing it out to each extended attribute. Unlike in xattred (which works in raw XML), you should not enter the XML ‘escape’ forms for characters, such as & for & (ampersand). SearchKey works with plain Unicode UTF-8 characters, and should handle any conversions automatically.
To remove one or more of the extended attributes which currently contains text, cut the contents of the respective text box to empty it, and tick the Strip checkbox at the far right of that text box.
⚠️ The text box needs to be empty and that box ticked for SearchKey to remove the entire attribute: this prevents accidental removal.
Once you are happy with the metadata, click on the Save button to write them out to the extended attributes for that file (or folder). You can then open another item to edit, open more new windows for other items, or quit the app in the normal way.
At any time, you can click on the Save to text button to save the current text box contents to a text file. You will then be prompted for the name and location of the text file into which to save that text. This lets you make a separate record of the extended attributes.
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