In Praise of AutoHotKey

I've used AHK a fair bit, and while it's quite helpful I can't help but want for a better syntax and less limited core language. I think it would do much better as a lisp with more obviously defined syntax boundaries.

> hardware keyboard with full keyboard macros

Do you use one? Which? I used one, very convenient, in eighties(!) and haven't seen something comparable since.

The functionality I had then that I liked was: any key could be programmed to really anything else (except the special "macro" key) -- another key or another sequence of the keys, and I regularly did some action once, recording it with just one "start recording" and one "stop and assign to.." action and after that just "playing" it when needed. It was a huge time / nerves saver at these times, especially because it was fully independent of the programs and even of which OS I've used (I've had to switch between two even then).

I can tell you that this program is so useful, automated everything in my system to be able to use it more smoothly and have saved a lot of time.

Oh man, I am using (abusing?) AHK so hard. I work with legacy software programs for structural analysis, where everything in the model has to be input with clunky form fields. Thousands of properties need to be defined for various structural components (beams, columns, etc). It used to be >2 weeks of entering numbers into fields and clicking buttons.

Now, AHK is set up to just reads my design spreadsheets and define everything in a few minutes. I hate the language syntax, but man is it useful! God bless AHK!

I absolutely love AutoHotKey. I've been using it for over 15 years. I used to use it to format my HTML back when i only used a Text Editor (similar to what this link is using for Markdown. I never use my right-control key so I map a lot of stuff to it. I used to have macros on rightctrl+b = surround the selection with and later (yes, it was that long ago). I had some nifty ones with logic for adding s (looking for @ and http://).

These days I use it for fewer things, but still really useful. One of those is making chat applications that don't offer ctrl+enter to send a message - Like Google Hangouts (basically flopping the functionality):

#IfWinActive Google Hangouts ahk_class Chrome_WidgetWin_1

    ^enter::
    Send {Enter}
    Return

    enter::
    Send +{Enter}
    Return

Another extremely useful is this one, which will type what's on the clipboard rather than pasting it:

    >^v::
    SendRaw %clipboard%
    Return

And when I hit shift also, it does it slow (for input lag situations):

    >^+v::
    SetKeyDelay 500
    SendRaw %clipboard%
    Return

Extremely useful for two main reasons. 1 being input boxes on websites that prevent pasting and 2. certain remote sessions that prevent pasting (like Kesaya or any kind of Console remote application).