AutoHotkey Community

[Laszlo]

It is easy to mimic the auto-hide behavior of the taskbar. When the mouse cursor is at a specified region on the edge of the screen, for about 1 second, a menu pops up. It is controlled by a slow running timer (4 times a second – without any measurable processor load). Different actions are performed at different regions, like with mouse gestures, but w/o the need for pressing any button or keyboard key.

In the script below two easy examples are provided: at the top of the screen a list of programs is shown, which can also contain documents or Internet shortcuts. Clicking on one, or pressing the Up/Down arrow keys and Enter, runs the associated program. Clicking outside of the menu or pressing Esc cancels.

The other example is more interesting. A menu pops up on the left edge of the screen, showing a list of document types I often work with. The bottommost entry is CleanUp, which checks the entries in the Windows Recent Documents list, end deletes the broken shortcuts (linking to files not there any more). There are also menu items for deleting a link, or showing all links pointing to recently used documents, and selecting one opens it with its default application.

This menu also contains items named by often used file extensions, like DOC, TXT. Activating one of them pops up another menu, with the files of this type, referenced in the Windows Recent Documents folder. Activating one starts a specified application with the selected file.

There are many possible extensions. For example, the list of programs, the boundaries of the regions could be read from an ini file, dynamically updated.

Version 1.2

[Rabiator]

Nice and expandable idea!

[Laszlo]

I updated the script in the original post to version 1.1. Any change in the list of file extensions and the corresponding applications has to be entered in only ONE place, making it easier to adapt the script.

[Laszlo]

Version 1.2 is posted:
- Added "ShowAll" to Recent Documents menu, which shows all the links, and opens the selected document with its default application.
- Added "DelLink" to Recent Documents menu, which shows all the links. Selecting one removes the shortcut to the selected document.
- Defined 25 regions, where the mouse cursor is detected, 12 are on the edges of the screen. If the mouse is there for 4 timer periods (1…1.25 second), the menu pops up with the name MenuXY, with X and Y = 1…5. 1 corresponds the left/top edge, 5 corresponds to the right/bottom edge of the screen. The numbers in between denote left/mid/right or top/mid/low regions.
- The boundaries between the regions are defined in the strings assigned initially to XX and YY. They contain 5 numbers separated by commas, starting with 0, ending with a large number.

[Rhys]

I like the script! Thanks for mentioning it or I would have missed it - I may be missing something, but I can't get the left menu to work - Clicking the items won't do anything that I can see.
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[Laszlo]

In Vista the location of the recently used files changed. Replace

[jak]

thanks for this, it rocks. Its so hard to find a decent "recent documents" app. This one is just about perfect

One thing I noticed though, the list of documents it shows, is alphabetical. Since this is about "recent" docs, wouldnt it make more sense to have them show by date modified (descending)? Is there a way to modify the existing script so it can do that?

Also I was wondering if there was a way to have it also show "recent folders" (not just documents)? I poked around on the forum but didnt really find anything like that (much to my surprise, it probably exists but I didnt see it with the keywords I was searching under...)

[Laszlo]

[jak]

thanks laszlo

[webber]

menu appears as supposed to, but clicking on any item seems to do nothing.

I edited:

[Laszlo]

It supposed to open submenus with recent files, and selecting one should launch it in the corresponding application.

[Drugwash]

If you modify the beginning of the script to the following, it should work in Win9x too (not sure about multi-user 9x setups):

[Laszlo]

Thanks! Most of us have only one computer, with one Windows version, so the posted scripts should be considered as code samples. We have to rely on users' feedback, so testing and adapting scripts for other Windows versions is valuable for the AHK community.

[webber]

[Laszlo]

Which version does not work (Recent = ...)? In XP Recent = %HOME%\Recent should work, unless you added (or implicitly included) #NoEnv to your script. In that case you could add a line "EnvGet Home, Home" to the beginning of your script.