A brief overview of AutoHotkey

Transcript

AutoHotKey is a keyboard remapping and macro creation tool. Now this tool
tends to be a difficult one to understand or to describe. You get it at
autohotkey.com. The default download for it – I used Installer for AutoHotKey
Basic, which is plenty for the average user. What I’m going to do is run the
.ahk file, the autohotkey file, that I have on my machine that will actually
cause AutoHotKey to be loaded.

So, all that’s really happened here is we now have this AutoHotKey icon down
in the notification area. If I now fire up a utility like Notepad, what
AutoHotKey allows you to do is define keyboard macros; I have several defined.
I chose to use the left bracket, I’m sorry, the right bracket key as the Escape
key if you will, for whatever it is I might want. So in my particular case, if
I type ]eg, you get my standard email signature typed in. If I type in ]eh, I
get the longer signature typed in. That turns out to be very powerful because
you find yourself typing the same thing a lot very often if you are doing email
or as in the case of myself, I also moderate a mailing list, a Corgi emailing
list, and this is one of the standard repsonses that I find myself sending out
all of the time. So rather than typing it from scratch every time, three
keystrokes and it’s part of the email.

So, how did all of this get defined? Well, let’s have a look at that .ahk
file that I opened up and you’ll see. So this is AutoHotKey’s probably biggest
drawback is that because it is so incredibly powerful, it is also a little on
the obscure side to program. You do end up having to learn a bit of a
programming language, but it’s for fairly simple operations; it’s actually
fairly simple language. You can see here (let me go to one of the ones that
uses my…that includes my signature). Here’s the Standard Ask Leo! Thanks for
asking text – you can see the ]eh is defined this way and then it’s just a
series of ‘Sends’ where it’s actually sending in keystrokes and it doesn’t
matter what application you happen to be sending them into. I sent them into
Notepad a few moments ago, but you can also send them into your favorite email
program; you could send them into Word; you could send them into a command
prompt; you could send them into just about anything since AutoHotKey operates
at the system keyboard level which means any application that is blindly asking
for keystrokes from Windows has AutoHotKey placed in front of it so that
whatever AutoHotKey does, gets sent to the application as if they were being
typed for real.

AutoHotKey actually allows you to do a lot of different things. I happened
to use it for a couple of scenarios. This one I wanted to show because it’s
fairly interesting. Paste in Command prompt. The Command prompt which is what
we use to refer to this window; it doesn’t have Windows standard keystrokes.
You can’t use ‘Ctrl C’, ‘Ctrl V’ kinds of things, but you can make it do that.
For example, if what this is saying is if the current window is a console
window and the keystroke that has just been pressed is a Ctrl-V (which we
normally see as ‘paste’), then automatically sends the input from the clipboard
to that application.

There are several different things here that are really interesting and just
sort of touch on the power of AutoHotKey. One is we’ve actually remapped a
keystroke. This Ctrl-V which normally doesn’t do anything in Command prompt, it
now has functionality. And we’ve restricted it to a specific type of window; in
other words, a console window or the Command prompt. We’ve gained access to the
clipboard and sent that in.

Another common use of AutoHotKey as I said is to remap keystrokes. This
particular one is a remap of the Windows key plus ‘E’. I don’t actually have
this set up on this machine, because I don’t have Explorer 2 turned on, but what
this does is allows you to define whatever you want the Win E key to do. Now,
you’ll notice that Win E by default, in Windows, fires up Windows Explorer. So
what I’ve done is I’ve overridden that. Win E on my systems with AutoHotKey
installed will (if it’s not already running which is what this line tells us)
will go and run from scratch, Explorer 2 which I use instead of Windows
Explorer. If the window does exist, it just activates it; in other words, it
brings the existing copy of Explorer 2 to the foreground.

The actual AutoHotKeys interface is pretty sparse. It’s mostly about
debugging. You can actually see the activity that its taken here as we’ve done
things which is basically a log of actions. You can reload the script which is
this .ahk file that I’ve created; you can edit it; you can pause it which
basically turns everything off. Which makes everything that you might have
typed not be recognized until you re-enable it and so forth.

And finally, the one last thing that I think sometimes people are a little
concerned about is if I type in…so I have a macro in AutoHotKey for the
current date (so today is 13 Nov 2011) what’s interesting to note is if you’ll
look carefully while I do that, I type the first character; I type the second
character and as soon as I type the third character and AutoHotKey recognizes
that, this is a three-character macro that it is supposed to act on. The first
thing it does before it actually inserts text is it executes three backspaces
to get rid of the three-character macro. So it all happened quickly but the
bracket the ‘t’ and the ‘d’ that I typed, the first two characters of which
were actually just typed into the Command prompt were erased. Now, that’s
important to realize for some programs and I say that because the programs that
act immediately on keystrokes can sometimes get confused by this. So that’s
when you end up having to define single-character macros only but most of the
time most text editing programs, most email that’s just using a regular plain
text kind of editor, this ability to use an aribitrary length flag or macro
name or keystroke sequence that you would use to fire off an AutoHotKey macro
is very powerful and is transparently and automatically removed once it
replaces that macro that you’ve typed in with the text that you’ve programmed
for that macro. The ability to remap keystrokes is probably one of the more
common questions that I get and I tend to point people at AutoHotKey
specifically because of its power. There is very little that I have found that
I’ve been unable to do with AutoHotKey. There is one scenario that I use almost
daily where instead of actually having AutoHotKey programmed for a particular
sequence of characters, I have it…it actually allows you to select the file.
I cannot show you that here because it’s not configured properly for this
virtual machine, but what this particular macro does is on a three-character
sequence, it will open a file ‘open dialogue’ box on a particular folder that
I’ve created (you can see that actually down here; it’s my folder of stock
answers) and allow me to select a file and then it will type in the contents of
that file as if I were typing it right then and there. That’s one of the ways
that when I respond to somebody in email, as you know many of the questions I
got are repeats rather than type the same answer over and over again I simply
have a collection of files that contain the answer and I simply tell AutoHotKey
go take the contents of this particular file and type it into my email messages
as if I were typing it live. That’s the kind of power that’s available in
AutoHotKey.

So what does the Window spy on the menu do? I have no idea;
I’ve never used it. Apparently, it lets you spy on Windows. I’m not sure
exactly; it’s basically looking at – it’s telling you mouse positions and a few
other things about the Window information that’s actually not normally
available to a casual Windows user. Much of this information here such as
visible Window text, status bar text, Window positions and so forth – they are
sometimes things that you might want to use in your AutoHotKey macros to
configure or control a specific application.