Filed under: Business, Developer, Text, Utilities, Windows, E-mail, Productivity, Freeware
AutoHotKey - Take Control of Your Keyboard
by Jason Clarke Aug 22nd 2005 at 9:22AM
The
other night as I was trying to fall asleep, I made a mental note to
search for a utility that I would like to have that I figured probably
didn't yet exist, or at least not in a way that would be useful to me.
I wanted to be able to remap hotkey assignments in a way that is
contextually valid depending on the application I'm in. In other words,
I'd like to be able to create consistent hotkeys regardless of the
program I'm in, so that pressing a given keystroke always performs a
similar action. In my case, I have been using an email client for awhile (NEOPro) that has some pretty well thought out and easy to use hotkeys, like pressing space marks a message as read, shift-space marks it unread, the backspace key will file the message, etc. I wanted to be able to have the same keystrokes perform the same actions in Outlook.
It turns out that the application I was looking for already exists, and even better, it's free! And the kicker is that it's far more powerful than just remapping keys, though it does that job extremely well. It's called AutoHotKey. Now I must warn you that this is a bit of a geeky tool in that there is no GUI for setting up hotkeys; you have to learn AutoHotKey's scripting language. Thankfully, it's quite simple, and doing a few quick searches for example code will almost always help you find what you're looking for. I have to say, I'm in love with this program.
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
l0ne said 12:29PM on 8-22-2005
Mac users: see the Keyboard & Mouse pane in System Preferences for equivalent functionality.
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Angel said 1:00PM on 8-22-2005
If you like AutoHotKey, you will like even more AutoIt v3 (www.autoitscript.com), which is the free tool in which AutoHotKey was originally based. The newest version is much easier to use and by far more powerful than AutoHotKey. The AutoIt syntax is like BASIC, it lets you control any program and it let's you create very easily your own GUIs.
For some reason AutoHotKey is getting a lot of press latelly, but they seem to ignore that AutoHotKey copied the AutoIt GPLd code, give very little credit to the AutoIt authors and then it did not keep up with the new features that have been added to AutoIT it the past year.
I've tried both, and AutoIT v.3 is so much better. Do yourself a favor and check their web page (www.autoitscript.com). Their forums are extremelly helpful.
Cheers,
Angel
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Adora said 5:23PM on 8-22-2005
I submitted autohotkey to dsq's tip line last week (I don't know if this was before or after it was featured on lifehacker, but I laughed when I saw it on there a couple of days ago). If there's something better than autohotkey, I'm definitely excited to try it out. I installed AutoIt, but as is common with more powerful applications, I've been working for about 45 minutes now and still don't have a hotkey. The help file doesn't mention too much about it, and even the example scripts listed on the forum are throwing errors.
Shame on AutoHotKey for their GPL squirlyness, but for someone who only wants custom system-wide hotkeys, I still say it's a better choice.
:: Lisa
:: adora [at] techslut [.] net
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