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In Praise of AutoHotKey

hillelwayne.com

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Re: In Praise of AutoHotKey

#31

Post by themodelplumber »

hateful wrote: post #29

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 @…

What are all these websites that prevent pasting? I noticed a few people are using tools to get around these.

Re: In Praise of AutoHotKey

#32

Post by themodelplumber »

gtbcb wrote: post #15

Here's what we really need - a tool that monitors the various user actions like specific application functionality used, website actions taken, and maybe keystrokes too (but that gets dicey), and then every month or so it recommends the most frequently done actions that you should automate with AHK or some other tool. What does the community think of this? PS - I use Alfred and Keyboard Maestro to get functionality s…

You visited HN 1,240 times in the last month.

We recommend that you just park it in a corner of your screen and turn on an auto-reload tool.

Re: In Praise of AutoHotKey

#34

Post by Arkanosis »

ufo wrote: post #22

The hotstrings feature is also present in Linux, where they are known as compose sequences. The default compose sequences can be found in the Compose files under /usr/share/X11/locale and you can also have custom compose sequences in ~/.XCompose. Some of the compose sequences make use of a special Compose key (written in the rules). You may need to go to the keyboard settings to enable the compose key. https://en.wik…

For more, sxhkd is easy to configure and powerful: https://github.com/baskerville/sxhkd

Re: In Praise of AutoHotKey

#35

Post by simonklitj »

nikivi wrote: post #3

On macOS a similar tool is Keyboard Maestro ( https://www.keyboardmaestro.com/main/ ). I made over 1400+ macros in it over time that automate practically everything for me now. https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/macos/macos-apps/keyboard-ma...

Would love to have a bunch of macros, but I honestly have a hard time imagining the 1400+ situations that are worth automating? Could you maybe provide some obscure examples of yours? That would be pretty cool.

Re: In Praise of AutoHotKey

#36

Post by m0nty »

themodelplumber wrote: post #31
hateful wrote: post #29

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 @…

What are all these websites that prevent pasting? I noticed a few people are using tools to get around these.

If you mean "why do they prevent pasting?" -- because their talented and conscientious devs think password managers are insecure. I've tried emailing several webmasters about this but it's a waste of time.

Re: In Praise of AutoHotKey

#37

Post by scottfr »

My company is trying to solve similar challenges for automating common typing tasks on web pages (email, chat, CRM, etc...) with our Chrome Extension Text Blaze [1].

It was a pretty extensive formula support [2] enabling you to create dynamic snippets. In many ways it's kind of like Excel but for documents.

[1] https://blaze.today/

[2] https://blaze.today/formulas/reference/

Re: In Praise of AutoHotKey

#38

Post by hobs »

gtbcb wrote: post #15

Here's what we really need - a tool that monitors the various user actions like specific application functionality used, website actions taken, and maybe keystrokes too (but that gets dicey), and then every month or so it recommends the most frequently done actions that you should automate with AHK or some other tool. What does the community think of this? PS - I use Alfred and Keyboard Maestro to get functionality s…

It would be the best privacy invading tool you could come up with :)

Re: In Praise of AutoHotKey

#39

Post by skymt »

I love AutoHotkey, and it works wonderfully in the niche of writing a bunch of tiny UI- and workflow-smoothing functions, like how an Emacs user gradually builds up tweaks in their config file. The one time I tried to use it for scripting that required more than the most basic logic, I ran screaming back to Python. Over a decade of well-meaning development and reasonable design choices have resulted in AHK growing a syntax Frankensteined together from Basic, JavaScript, and batch script. Thankfully the upcoming AHK 2 is cleaning up a lot of the mess.

https://www.autohotkey.com/v2/v2-changes.htm

Re: In Praise of AutoHotKey

#40

Post by bcassedy »

AHK was how I got back into programming. I wrote some scripts to help reduce RSI playing online poker and then later when I worked in a call center wrote some scripts to automate dialing my phone and macros for basic notetaking.

A clunky as it is, it is a fantastic tool.

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