meta_robert

AutoHotKey is definitely more than just a “Hot Key App Launcher”

I started using AutoHotKey recently. I was inspired by conversations about the Mac OSX app “Quicksilver.” I really interested in the MacBreak Weekly Quicksilver conversation, but disappointed that it was an OSX app. Sometime shortly after, there was talk about Windows alternatives on another TWIT podcast. In fact, I believe it was actually on “This Week in Tech” Among the options, the only one I liked was AutoHotKey. It can assighn simple tasks to hotkey combo’s, like opening an app or website when you press a hotkey combo (e.g. ctrl+alt+I to open IE, if you like) It goes FAR beyond that if you desire to spend some time and effort. Here’s an example of something fairly simple that I wrote:

^!r::
    send ^c
    clipwait
    run "http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%clipboard%&btnG=Search"
    run "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%clipboard%&go=Go"
return

I do a lot of lookups in Google and Wikipedia. What this code does is copy anything I have selected, then open Wikipedia and Google with relevant search results.

1. The first line assigns the key sctrl+alt+r (I chose “R” for ‘Research)
2. The second instructs AutoHotKey to “Copy” by sending the copy shortcut of “Ctrl+C”
3. The third line basically says “wait here until the copy is done”
4. The fourth and fifth lines are a bit tricky. I went to Google and Wikipedia, ran searches, and copied their URLs. It was a simple task finding my searches embedded in the URL. Note the %clipboard% reference in each line. You can probably guess that this is the place the “copy” was stored from line 2. I just put %clipboard% in place of the search strings I found in there.
5. The fifth line? If you have no scripting or programming background, this just says, “Done, go back to whatever you were doing”

I’ll post some more examples, including some more complicated ones.