AutoHotkey Community

This is a working draft of a decent alternative to alt-tab. If you assign this to a hotkey, you no longer have to hold down the alt key, and it makes it more convenient to use an auto-hide taskbar without using a mouse. I developed this to use with Dragon NaturallySpeaking since their mouse support is, ahem, cumbersome.

This script sets focus to the first item on the taskbar, "unhiding" the taskbar if necessary. You can then use the arrow keys or type the name of the app to set focus to the item, then press enter to activate it.

[EDIT: this is the new version of the code, see 2 posts down for the new post.]

I hope this is a useful starter script for folks, it's certainly been convenient for me while dealing with RSI... ~Ivo

Simple and useful!
Great reusing of capabilities!

Thanks much.

Here's a new, generalized version. The 2nd half just moves the mouse away from the taskbar, only relevant for autohide taskbar scenarios.


If anyone knows how to detect if the taskbar is set to auto-hide, that would add a nice little bit of polish.

Ivo

Assuming you send these:
sysget, Mon, Monitor
sysget, SM_CYCAPTION, 4
sysget, SM_CYFULLSCREEN, 17
WinGetPos,,, tbW, tbH, ahk_class Shell_TrayWnd

I think if SM_CYCAPTION+SM_CYFULLSCREEN equals MonBottom-MonTop, the taskbar is autohidden.

if SM_CYCAPTION+SM_CYFULLSCREEN+tbH equals MonBottom-MonTop, the taskbar is not hidden.

Another way would be to compare the results of
sysget, Mon, Monitor and sysget, MonWorkArea, MonitorWorkArea

Thank you, that's fabulous. ^_^

I'll write this up when I have time (probably months from now given how my project is going) or will happily integrate it if anyone provides the finished code segment.

*waves cheerfully*

I've tried this and it doesn't really do anything useful for me. What am I missing? What should it be doing as far as task switching? If I need to run it each time to accomplish something, is that easier than alt-tab?

Sorry if I've totally missed what and how this works; it could all just be my problem. Thanks for any help.

Sorry to leave out a required setup step. I keep an AutoHotkey script running persistently so that my various hotkeys can be used at any time. This script is intended to be assigned to a hotkey or hotstring. The ahk help has info about making scripts persistent.

This script is probably only interesting to DNS users and people who have enough windows open at once that alt-tabbing becomes impractical (I often have 20-30 apps open.) In my case, I've assigned it to a voice recognition macro by way of Dragon Naturally Speaking, which has poor task switching to start with.

For those who are interested, if you set up your taskbar on the right or left, set it to autohide, and make it very wide, you get the benefit of seeing the full title of your apps as you switch tasks using the arrow keys or by typing the name of the app to move the taskbar selection to that item.