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In Praise of AutoHotKey

hillelwayne.com

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Re: In Praise of AutoHotKey

#2

Post by erhserhdfd »

This is a great tool I use all the time. In addition to about 2 dozen hotstrings, I have a script that will automatically open my email editor, a script that will open my calendar to allow me to schedule a meeting, and a script that will open a new message in Slack to allow me to quickly fire off a message.

Huge time saver!

Re: In Praise of AutoHotKey

#4

Post by melling »

“Let’s start with a simple one. I use Dragon voice to text for writing as I can speak prose a lot faster than I can type.“

I often use Siri on my iPhone to write messages, etc. It’s pretty good but at times frustrating.

How does Dragon on Windows compare? I like the tablet form factor. Does Dragon work well on a Surface Go?

Re: In Praise of AutoHotKey

#5

Post by geocrasher »

A thousand times, this. I love AHK. It, along with Ditto Clipboard Manager (Yes, I know W10 has its own. It sucks) changes my workflow so much for the better. Some of my favorite examples:

Right Alt becomes Ctrl Tab: Ralt::^Tab

Common typos: ::teh::the ::alreadsy::already

::nopity::Call to undefined function pity()

::awk1::awk '{{} print $1 {}}'

::du-m::du -m --max-depth=1 | sort -n

But it goes waaay behond this. I once used AHK to assist my grandfather, who in his old age had caused him to lose dexterity. He was clicking both right and left mouse buttons at the same time. I used AHK to disable the might mouse button and then mapped right click to Number Pad +. Worked beautifully.

I actually wrote a Big Long Article about it once: https://www.tidbitsfortechs.com/2013/10/using-autohotkey-to-...

Re: In Praise of AutoHotKey

#6

Post by Timpy »

I recently wrote a script that I call with Meta+F, assigned via a Linux Mint keyboard shortcut. It will open Firefox, or focus it if it's already open. Multiple presses will cycle through open instances. Meta+T does the same for terminals. It's like a focused version of Alt+Tabbing through programs.

Re: In Praise of AutoHotKey

#8

Post by ronjouch »

Linux users, see https://github.com/autokey/autokey . I use it for purposes very similar to those described by the article (little automation scripts, text expansion).

It's equally as {sometimes awesome, sometimes infuriatingly quirky} as its Windows inspiration :D , but I guess it's the nature of such a tool :) .

Won't work (yet?) on Wayland, though, https://github.com/autokey/autokey/issues/87 .

Re: In Praise of AutoHotKey

#9

Post by rishav_sharan »

AutoIt ( I know this is about AHK but hear me out) was my first actual coding language. this was way back in 2008 when I was a manual tester and I decided to work on an automation framework around testing our .net based app. the documentation was amazing. the language are incredibly simple. and the windows integration was insane. In a way, if I hadn't worked on the automation framework using autoit, i probably wouldn't have decided to learn python, js and other languages and really wouldn't be where I am.

So, much love to the AHK/Autoit team.

Re: In Praise of AutoHotKey

#10

Post by evantahler »

AutoIt was how I learned to program in 2007! We were using it to control show effects for spaceship-themed exhibit at school!

All the buttons, TVs, lighting effects... all run from windows PCs with AutoIt!

(there was a flash photo gallery, because 2007, but here are some of the images)

https://www.etc.cmu.edu/projects/lbe/S07/clients/ETC/gallery... https://www.etc.cmu.edu/projects/lbe/S07/clients/ETC/gallery...

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