AutoHotkey Community

Hi all,

In an effort to increase my efficiency by learning the "best" scripts everyone uses, I thought I'd post a list of my faves that save me an incredible amount of time. Maybe by sharing our lists we can help one another work better.

Some things I've done:

1. Remap the ESC key to close windows on my screen from a variety of applications.
2. Make hot text to "tag" certain things, like my to do list (When I type todo, AHK creates <todo></todo> tags in which i can type text. Simple, but useful for GTD. I can then parse the XML and create more impressive lists.
3. Create scripts to comma and pipe-delimit lists in excel and notepad that are separated by carriage returns. By doing so I can quickly create INSERT statements in SQL.
4. Change the mouse wheel behavior on any mouse to close a browser window, scroll up and down in the window, scroll up and down a single page, and cycle through tabs. With a combination of mouse and keyboard I can quickly read any web page.
5. Use a pop-up "reference" menu that opens the search engine of my choice with the contents of the clipboard.
6. Automatically paste my Amazon partner ID with any book ISBN to an HTML link that I can either post to my blog or send to others.
7. Create dialog GUIs to generate SQL Server stored procedure parameters, VBA class code, Properties, and SQL Server metadata.


What sort of every day functions do you all use -- especially that have improved your efficiency? I'm both a software developer and PhD student, so any tips that will improve my productivity will help.

Thanks,

Rob

This sort of post should be in Scripts & Functions. There is also a wiki page with a very large list of all kinds of useful scripts.

_________________

(Common Answers) - New Tutorials Forum - Humongous FAQ

Hi,

Sorry about that, though the description of this forum includes "Post helpful tips and tricks." Since I wasn't sharing specific script code -- just names of scripts -- I didn't think I should post in the Scripts area.

I distinguish this post from the wiki by the fact that the wiki isn't separated by favorite scripts of each person, and a post here provides that information.

I'm open to suggestions.

good point.

everything I type is my opinion, not law

I suprisingly have very few scripts running at any given moment.

I have a script that switches between different versions of the software we make at work (I'm part of tech support)

Most of my AHK is done for my wife. She ends up doing alot of tedious work that I automate to save her time.
- A script that takes a folder of images and makes them into a powerpoint file
- A couple of conversion scripts for different filetypes
- Shortcuts to often used folders
- a greek hotstring script (tpye *alpha to get greek alpha)

_________________

(Common Answers) - New Tutorials Forum - Humongous FAQ

1. Also replaced ESC in multiple applications to close windows/objects. e.g. in Opera
2. Changing in any application hotkeys to the format I want it to be, to be faster or more efficient or logical (in my thinking). Meaning I'm independent of how the application developer thought he should define the hotkeys. (They should be only available.)
3. "Tunneling" data "through" applications. Usage of any application with some useful features just to use that feature ("tunneling through it"). e.g. you can tunnel through the internet using a browser, (here an input tunnels through a URL-link and you get as output your html-data which you can further filter to your wishes).
4. Changing states in applications without having to activate it, e.g. Winamp.
5. Minimizing current window with

6. Mass processing. Having an automation which works on a single file is applied on all files in a dir including all subdirs. So you can go to the kitchen to drink a coffee and AutoHotkey works hardly.

engunneer wrote:Ahh, you told about it. I recall you've mentioned the following ones as well ...

- A script that irons my shirts and folds them the way I like
- A couple of men talking to women convers(at)ion scripts
- Shortcuts to favourite TV channels like "Playboy Mansion" and "ToolTime"
- a geek hotstring script (tpye *alpha to let me feel that way)

I always run k-html with which I can:

- use my text replacements everywhere
- launch an instance of my Web browser
- launch an instance of my text editor
- launch a perpetual calendar
- write the current time
- write the current date
- get the #RRGGBB color value of a pixel under the mouse pointer
- add quotation marks, parenthesis, brackets, braces or any set of HTML tags around a selection
- convert a selection into an HTML list or an HTML table
- remove all HTML tags of a selection
- etc.

_________________
Normand Lamoureux

What do you do with AHK?

My "couldn't live without" scripts would be:

• Mouse Gestures
• WindowPad
• My hotkey script (many hotkeys, and hotstrings to correct my three most frequent typos: auothotkey, windwo, coma.u)
• A script to control my running scripts via hotkey & menu.

So basically, all the scripts I have running.

Not really "couldn't live without", but I use ACConsole frequently on and off the forums.

Wow, let's see. Going through my main script, in order...

• Correct my most common typos (thign, abotu...)
  
• Customize hotkeys for specific apps.
  
• Hotstrings for text I type alot, e.g. !m = ManaUser
  
• Reverse the direction of wheel-zooming in some apps, so up=in and down=out in all of them.
  
• Panic button (Hides active window, I really dislike people watching over my shoulder, even if what I'm doing actually very uninteresting.)
  
• Wheel left and right are Ctrl+(Shift+)Tab, or Alt+(Shift+)Tab if the wheel is pressed down.
  
• Ctrl+Alt+N opens notepad, unlike the windows shortcut I had before, I can open multiple notepads with this.
  
• Some shortcuts that use the windows key.
  
• Chime when caps lock is pressed. (To prevent aCCIDENTS.)
  
• Almost everything from my Appskeys script. (Some I could probably live without.)
  
• Launch various other AutoHotkey scripts.
  
• Auto-maximize help windows and switch the Control Panel back to "Icons" view. (For unknown reasons these two settings won't stick.)

How did you do this? I had the following idea so far: Creating a window with all running .ahk scripts, showing in smaller fonts (beside or below) also any comments after ";;" in those scripts. Beside each script name there should be two buttons:
1. button: pause/continue
2. button: exit (with auto-window update of the window contents after each exit-use)

Have you a similar solution or totally different?

"via hotkey and menu."
I press #q, and the script shows a menu. It looks for running scripts (ahk_class AutoHotkey) and builds a menu. Each script is assigned a number ("&%Num%. %ScriptName%"), so I can press 1 for the first script, 2 for the second, etc. Selecting a script from the menu shows a submenu with open, reload, edit, pause, suspend, view lines/vars/hotkeys/keyhistory, exit and kill (for when exit won't work.) There's also a menu item to open the actual tray menu (if it has a tray icon), since the control script would otherwise need to be run as admin to control any script running as admin.

Would you mind sharing your solution here?

I like this thread. Got some ideas already. Post away please...

Just some I use regularly:

- hotstrings for autocorrect/autoreplace. I type "myadd", out comes my long business address. "myphone"...., etc...

- a simple gui window which displays a random quote from random text files. used for e-mails.

- nDroid by rajat for launching all my apps. I can't remember when I last peeked at the start menu. zero icons on the desktop.

- mouse gestures - by rodfell or by lexicos, good ones. thank you both.

- I grabbed several features from manauser's appskey. thank you as well.

- alt tab with icons (I modified the one in the scripts section)

- morse function by Laszlo. I hit ctrl twice,reloads the script. I hit pause once, launches notepad2, hit pause twice, launches ultraedit, etc..

- a popup menu with different time formats. time stamps.

AHKControl