The string variant worked very well, thank you!
AS for the configuration by views - We do have views and we use them to separate our hundreds of projects to groups, but even if I would want to use it - it will still require me to click through dozens of check boxes if i want to disable the whole group. Therefore "check all"/"uncheck all" still makes a lot of sense to me. What if i need to disable three/four groups??
Our job names are actually including group name (in a format of group+jobname), therefore if I would like to work with one or more groups I will now go to the string slicer, cause it has jobs listed in alphabetic order so i can manage them much easier, but never to "by view" - too many clicks.
Here is what I could do quickly for you, and it lines up with what I needed for myself anyways.
See latest version 1.32 of this plugin for the string slicer feature.