AutoHotkey Community

Howdy,

Could any of you AutoKey cowpersons set me on the trail, I doggone got my nether regions tangled in some loose barbed wire.

I've not been able to fathom a way to create two key stroke hotekys that work like the old WordStar word processor keyboard worked (Whooee! does that mark my days on behind a keyboard).


While the control key is pressed down, I wish to define any number of a two letter combinations as hotkeys. I was hoping something simple like these would work for example:

^k & ^l:: {...}

Ctrl & k & l:: {...}

.... but they produce a syntax error even though the docs imply this should be possible. If you are familiar with the Keyboard mapper in Microsoft Office, it lets you do this and defines them as Ctrl-K, Ctrl-L.

One might depict this as follows:

While (Control is pressed down), detect any of the following L-key combinations
L then D:: send Ctrl-Right
L then A:: send Ctrl-Left
L then R:: send Home
(ad nauseum)
EndWhile

One might do the same with the K key.

BTW, for years I have used a keyboard macro program written in Win 3.1 days called Bridge Batch. Unfortunately Vista seems to have finally laid it to a well deserved rest out in the pucker brush. I think Autokey is my best hope for replacing it.

Thanks very much for any assistanc you can give,
Kenton

I read it all but at the end I lost the one thing you are posting for

Perhaps you could adapt this script, which is for "Ctrl+Shift+Alt+2 digit number" hotkeys.

Thank you both for you replies. Sorry if I was confusing, comes from giving up on the caffeine and being way past bed time. I did see the script you mentioned, lexikos, and when a free moment arises I will see if I can adapt it. The first time I took a gander at it it did not look like it as going to do it. However, it might just have the part I need. If it does, AHK might be well on its way to replacing the other tools I use. One item that would be missing, is the ability to save binary data form the clipboard and assoicate it with a hotkey. Great for creating a Library fo stuff from the clipboard. Macro Toolworks, (www.pitrinec.com), has this feature. Something to think about.

Best,
Kenton

The difficulty is to keep the application-defined Ctrl-digit shortcuts intact. E.g. in Ms Word Ctrl-0 changes the format of the current paragraph. We cannot keep them unchanged, because at seeing Ctrl-0 we don't know if a new digit would follow, so we have to wait. If next the Ctrl key is released, we see that it was not a Ctrl-07 type hotkey, so at this point we can send Ctrl-0 shortcut to the application. That is, the action is performed at the release of the Ctrl-key.

Right you are. That seems to work well, but I think Kenton was after Ctrl+Letters.

You can adjust the starting point (96) and count (26) to include other characters, if need be. Alternatively, you could specify a string of characters to use:

Hey Guys,

Thanks for the input on this. Your exmaples and discussion helped me flush it out. So, I think I've got it working by dynamically remapping the keys.

Let me backup before delivering the script. When I first did this in Windows 10 years ago in Windows 3.1 (Oh Gawd! Can it really be?! - show 'n awe man), well I used a tool called Bridge Batch, made by a company now long out of business. At the time it cost $300 or so! Yee eee Ouch, man!. I protest too much, my employer purchased it. Anyway, despite the fact that it is 16bit the Win Hooks API has remained compatible. Somewhat amazing, wouldn't you say ay! There were quirks mind you and some 32 bit programs refused to obey.

So what exactly am I doing. I mentioned that this idea came from the WordStar word processor keyboard (and they may have got it somewhere else for all I could know). In the far off DOS days I used an editor written in assembler called QEdit. Man was that guy fast! Well QEdit used the WordStar keyboard. The primary objective of this keyboard was to allow you to edit withoug ever having to remove your hand from the home row. To do this comfoortably it is first necessary to have the Ctrl key on the home row as it was in wonderful days of yore.

You will notice the little diamond formed by the keys E, D, X, S. In WS key land you held down Ctrl, having to release it would totally ruin the effect - it must act just like the shift key - while pressing these keys to move the cursor around, for example:

Ctrl-E = Up
Ctrl-D = Right
Ctrl-X = Down
Ctrl-S = Left

Lovely, ay, what! With your left hand never leaving the comfort of home, you can move all around. But that is just the start of course. There are more functions that you can accomodate by just using one key. So the next step would be to combine two keys and make them mean something. For example, still holding down Ctrl, again, never having to release it to release the keys, you would type:
Ctrl-KL= Select from cursor to EOL
Ctrl-KK = Cut (it would send a Ctrl-X )
Ctrl-KO = Cut

And so on and so forth etc, etc. Now frankly, I have modified there combinations quite a bit so that left and right hands alternate more, because this seemed to be faster at the time for instance:

Ctrl-LS = Start of Line
Ctrl-LD = End of Line

The beauty of this, you might notice, is that S was Left and D was right so in a way the two keystroke combination has just made the movement bigger. Right well that's enough of that. The second objctive was to be able to use this *reallly wonderful* editing technique in all my windows programs when I switched to Windows. So no matter what app., you are in and in spite of any of its quirks, you can bend it to you will. What I would do was have a hotkey to load a program say Ctrl-2 for Outlook, and at the same time load the hotkey map for Outlook. This was a bit of a pain because you had to remember to do that. Later using Macro Toolworks, which used window hooks to watch the interface, I was able to load my hotkeys auto-magically. BOY! Is this NERDY! I forgot how WHACKED this really is. OK, OK, the script already:



Yeah, yeah, I know lot's of Gotos. I don't know if there is another way of doing this with AHK and that is where you expers will come in. This script works for for SciTE and all that remains now is to figure out how to load a new set of keys for each app. Well, that and finishing all the scripts for the 15 or so apps that I've written them for.

It took me sometime to figure out how to get it all to work in AHK. With some of the configurations in the procedures, there was some really strange behavior, where the hotkeys would just stop working. It seemed to depend on where I put the remap commands with HotKey.

I would count your opinions most valuable. I have been happily editing this with the aid of AHK and except for the fact that this text box uses the standard Ctrl-End to go to the end of a line and SciTE uses a non-standard Alt-End therefor rendering my Ctrl-KD unusable at the present, I'm a happy man. You AHK developer-type guys really ROCK man!

Thanks,
Kenton[/code]

:?:
Ctrl+Home/End are "goto beginning/end of document" in most Windows apps...

To make it context sensitive, you could replacewithor whichever keypresses it is you need.

Also, you can use SendMode to make Send synonymous with SendInput, rather than typing SendInput every time.

Dead right lexikos! Confusing myself there a wee bit. Too much jubilation, I fathom. It seems though in SciTE that Home/Alt-Home and End/Alt-End do the same thing.

Good tip on the finger saving SendMode. I'll do that!

[bold]Question for you [/bold]. On making this context sensitive for applications, my thought would to find a way to load and unload a particular script for each application. Using conditionals in the script would just get too messy and the files a mite large. Anyway do you know of a way to dynamically load and unload a script from AHK.

Thanks,
Kenton

OK, I'm coming at this a couple of months late, but I posted about this just about exactly two years ago. Take a look at http://www.autohotkey.com/forum/topic5023.html for my solution. I've been running this script for a couple of years now and it works like a champ.

Kaiwen

I've visited the topic, as I was (and am) also looking for WordStar navigation emulation and I've seen an excerpt of your script.

Although I understand the idea and I think I could do it from it, it would be a duplicated effort if you wouldn't mind sharing the whole script, or, at least, the WordStar movement part.

Thanks a lot.

_________________
Regards.