AutoHotkey Community

[JDN]

I decided to write this thread for the benefit of newcomers to AutoHotkey. I hope that the more experienced users will be a little patient with this thread if they find its tone to be a little too elementary for them. It seems to me that if some of the experienced users want to give back to the AHK community, one excellent way would be to pick an introductory topic and write a post or thread to help new users with something that almost all of us have had to face at some point or another. I just hope that this thread will benefit new users and not be seen as just a pain in the neck. Please try to be patient and try to remember when you yourself were a newcomer and were having problems with these same kinds of elementary problems?

I hope that new AutoHotkey users will find this thread to be of interest. The topic is how best to handle a large number of hotkeys - specifically, how to organize them into files and how to ensure that you trigger the appropriate hotkeys when working on the appropriate tasks. I'm sure there are many different ways to handle these different configurations, and I hope the reason new users will find this beneficial, is because as they become more experienced with AHK, the number of hotkeys they create and try to manage tends to grow larger and larger. And, eventually, everyone has to face the fact that there are only a limited number of hotkeys available that can be put into a single file. So, eventually, we just had to somehow split our collections of hotkeys into multiple files. As that number grew, our collection of hotkeys likewise grew until they simply no longer could all fit into a single file.

I want to thank people like Majkinetor who contributed some fine suggestions and techniques on this topic and I'd very much like to encourage anyone else who wishes to get involved to please lend a hand. If you see something here that doesn't look right, by all means, please post a note to this thread and please help us out.

So, just to get some definitions straight, let's define "activation key" to mean a combination of zero or more modifer keys (such as ALT, CTL, SHIFT & WIN) plus one regular key (such as one of the 26 letter keys or 10 number keys). There are usually four modifer keys (ALT, CTL, SHIFT & WIN) but different keyboards and different systems have different numbers and types of keys available. In addition, AHK enables you to define the left ALT key separately from the right ALT key and also enables you to make several other kinds of distinctions like that. AHK has many nice surprises like that available. Also, AHK uses the exclamation point "!" to stand for ALT, the "^" for CTL, the "+" for SHIFT and the "#" for WIN.

Another term we should define is "Script File" or "Hotkey Definition File" ("HDF"). Let's agree these both mean the same thing and they mean a text file that may contain zero or more hotkey definitions as well as zero or more AHK commands. A single HDF cannot be empty - at least it wouldn't be of any interest if it were. It must contain at least one command or at least one hotkey definition. However, it certainly can consist of a number of commands together with zero hotkeys or alternatively, it can consist of a number of hotkeys together with zero commands.

So, if you consider that you can use the 26 letters (A-Z) and the ten numbers (0-9) to activate your hotkeys, eventually, you will plumb run out of combinations. Let's say there are four modifier keys (ALT, CTL, SHIFT & WIN), then there are 16 combinations of modifier keys (ALT, CTL, SHI, WIN, ALT+CTL, ALT+SHI, ALT+WIN, CTL+SHI, CTL+WIN, SHI+WIN, CTL+SHI+WIN, ALT+SHI+WIN, ALT+CTL+WIN, ALT+CTL+SHI, ALT+CTL+SHI+WIN, NONE). So, this would mean there are a total of 16 * 36 or 576 possible activation keys available. Of course, this number is not very accurate. For one thing there are many more possible keys besides the 26 letters and 10 numbers. Given the 24 function keys, 10 number pad keys, plus all the punctuation, cursor, navigation keys, etc. there are probably closer to 100 heys than 36. But, on the other hand, many of those combinations are extremely awkward and painful to finger and so basically, no one would define all those combos as hotkey triggers because it would just be too awkward and painful to use them. But, the number of activation key sequences available is really not the important issue. Given that you can split up your hotkeys into several different files, and given that the same activation sequences can be used in multiple files, that means there are essentially an unlimited number of choices available. So, no one should ever have to work with hotkeys they feel are awkward or painful to use.

Originally, I thought the answer to this issue would be fairly simple and straightforward. But, I was wrong. It turns out that there are several ways to handle this problem - and depending on how you want to organize your hotkeys and how you decide to allocate various sets of hotkeys to match various sets of applications.

Originally, I split up my hotkeys into a few differnt Hotkey Files. I took all of the hotkeys I used when working with my word procesor and put them into a HDF named WORD_PRO.AHK. Then, I took all of the hotkeys I used when working with my editor and put them into a HDF named EDITOR.AHK.

There is nothing obviously wrong with this approach, and it may very well be a good way to work with hotkeys and if so, you will find the necessary commands used to load Hotkey Definition Files (aka Script Files) in the files presented here in this thread. But, just for your information, here is a sample hotkey that loads an HDF named EDITOR.AHK.

[majkinetor]

You can monitor active windows and execute hotkeys automaticaly based on active application. Thats how I do it anyway and it seems much faster then above as everything is executing from single instance.

My setup is like this (example for 1 hotkey in 2 apps):


Shortcuts.ahk

[JDN]

That is very interesting. I need to take some time to think about it. But I think that is probably a much superior way to manage a large collection of hotkeys.

I only ever use about six apps at most. So, I could just target all of my hotkeys to the appropriate apps and the right one would automatically execute.

Most of my hotkeys deal with editing and word processing. I use two different editors and only one word processor. So, I would just target my editing hotkeys to operate only when an editor or word processor is active. That is an excellent approach.

Thank you very much.

[JDN]

This post has now become obsolete. Sorry.

[JDN]

I originally wrote this post to contain some conclusions I made about the process described in this thread. But, this post became pretty much obsolete and so I rewrote the info in the first post of the thread and hope that won't be too confusing to people who come to this thread looking for some help in dealing with large numbers of hotkeys.

Anone who has some suggestions or advice as to how to handle this topic or this thread is very welcome to participate. I would very much appreciate your opinions - either by writing a post to this thread, or by sending me a PM. Either would be fine, and I would thank you for your help.

[epconfig]

Managing a large number of hotkeys! It is exactly the problem we faced at the beginning. We needed 100+ hotkey-macros to open websites/ files, select accounts/ fonts/ printers, start programs, type special characters and so on.

Actually we had 4 problems:

1. It was almost impossible to remember all of our hotkeys and even less possible to ask a part time employee to remember them.
   
2. It was frequent and very damaging to press the wrong hotkey which was activating the wrong macro.
   
3. It was time-consuming to find and modify a macro and/or replace a hotkey in our script file.
   
4. Some of the hotkeys that we were selecting for our macros were disabling useful existing hotkeys in Windows environment.
   

We solved everything with a customizable keyboard like the Enterpad. The graphic overlay on the Enterpad solved the problem of remembering and pressing the wrong hotkey. Actually, the way we built our AutoHotkey script file makes modifications a lot easier. Finally, our script file uses only one hotkey (F10) followed by a three digit number (001 to 120) to trigger 120 different macros. This means that we do not disable other predefined Windows hotkeys.

Our AutoHotkey script template, the Enterpad ready-to-print overlay and a tutorial are available free at www.cedeq.com/enterpad-p120/autohotkey-english.html

Enjoy!
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epconfig
Enterpad Keyboard for AutoHotkey

[engunneer]

the enterpad looks pretty cool. You need to whip up a gui to help users edit/create code.

You also should come out with different sizes of the enterpad. 120 seems like alot of hotkeys.
_________________
Unless otherwise noted, all code is untested.
Common Answers: 1.(Loops, Viruses, etc.) 2. Search 3.RTFM

[automaticman]

+ That's an interesting idea how to make out of 1 hotkey N hotkeys using a number after the hotkey. For a 3 digit format we could multiplicate/increase our initial hotkey space from 1 to 1000 (000 .. 999), not bad.

If you would map certain numbers always to the same feature sets this would get useful, it would be easy to remember your hotkeys as they would have in each application sets the same functionality. e.g.

000 initialize
001 open
002 close
003 save
004 save as
005 undo

111 repeat
222 inverse repeat

... or any other much more intelligent mapping system, depending on the application area.

Having a midi keyboard with 5 octaves in front of me (5*12=60 keys) I wouldn't buy your Enterpad product. But it might be interesting for some secretaries who can do some extra work that their boss will buy an enterpad for them (after entering the secretary with their pad). I know not very funny.

[epconfig]

automaticman,

The idea of doing 120 (virtual) hotkeys from 1 (true) hotkey came after we came across two problems using 120 different (true) hotkeys:

1. Some of the hotkeys that we were selecting for our macros were disabling useful existing hotkeys in Windows environment.
   
2. We had some problems when a hotkey had to trigger another hotkey.

Here is the script template I wrote to solve our problems:

[automaticman]

Yes, I downloaded that code already from your site to test it. Have you any system/method/standard how to apply these "virtual hotkey numbers" to certain functions/features of applications?

[automaticman]

The added value of enterpad is it's directness. You simply have a physical button, when pressed some action is triggered immediately. (No hotkeys, no mouse clicks, nothing else necessary.)

This means, as long as the automations are implemented 100% error free, the users of enterpad just have to know how to press the right button on the enterpad, nothing else.

[epconfig]

[automaticman]

[epconfig]

[automaticman]

If you could sell the Enterpad for less than
Total: 364.00 (Canadian $)
you could even market it as a musicians tool, like a midi controller, offering 120 buttons, which could be combined nicely with other midi poti-controller solutions. Electronic musicians would prefer maybe more a setup like 16 x 10 = 160 keys as many step sequencers use 16th notes for a bar/measure.
Maybe this idea is also worth considering, btw. how many Euro are 364 Canadian $?