AutoHotKey
What
As per the AutoHotkey website...
|
AutoHotkey is a free, open-source utility for Windows. With it, you can:
- Automate almost anything by sending keystrokes and mouse clicks. You can write a mouse or keyboard macro by hand or use the macro recorder.
- Create hotkeys for keyboard, joystick, and mouse. Virtually any key, button, or combination can become a hotkey.
- Expand abbreviations as you type them. For example, typing "btw" can automatically produce "by the way".
- Create custom data-entry forms, user interfaces, and menu bars. See GUI for details.
- Remap keys and buttons on your keyboard, joystick, and mouse.
- Respond to signals from hand-held remote controls via the WinLIRC client script.
- Run existing AutoIt v2 scripts and enhance them with new capabilities.
- Convert any script into an EXE file that can be run on computers that don't have AutoHotkey installed.
|
So basically you can automate all types of tasks, anything from simple text expansion (as with ActiveWords) to managing the windows of an existing application, to
reading/writing/parsing text files to software test automation. It has its own scripting language and there are many existing code snippets. The snippets I use most
often are a keystroke macro (WinKey + V for me) that pastes the contents of the clipboard in clear text, with all formatting removed, and then another set of keystroke
macros that control Winamp as it runs in a background window. I've also used AutoHotKey extensively in terms of this website, both for abbreviation-into-custom-html-tag
expansion and for formatting of the swsom code. With the latter I was able to transform the text of a given auto-generated Get/Set Property into a ReadOnly version, with
a single keystroke (which really mattered since I had to do it for 300+ Properties, after a quick eyeballing of each). The AutoHotKey code is usually stored in a simple
text file with a .ahk file extension, though it can also be compiled into a .exe if necessary.
Some ideas
Run a Summation .vs script that examines a populated Lookup table and produce .ahk hotstrings for each item in the table. With that AutoHotKey code running, any time
a given 'CodeCol' value is typed out in Summation (and suffixed with a specific character) those letters will be replaced with the (longer) text of its companion
'Expansion Col' value. For example, type a shortcut from an existing lookup table like 'AIG:' while in any field of the Column view and the text 'American International
Group, Inc.' would appear instead.
It is usually much more productive to remain solely on the keyboard during data entrly, as opposed to repeatedly switching focus in order to take some action using the
mouse. As a mouse-avoidance example we can create a .ahk script that moves the pages in the Summation Image view either forward or backward when a specific keystroke combo
is struck.