Assign a non-AHK shortcut to launch your main AHK script

[bonobo]

Did you know that windows allows you to assign a "shortcut to a shortcut"? That is, a system-wide keyboard shortcut to launch an .lnk shortcut file (as long as you place the .lnk file in the Start Menu folder)?

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If, like me, you sometimes need to quit then re-launch (rather than simply reload) AHK, you can put something like this in the autoexec section of your main script. The example code allows the use of "ctrl+alt+q" to launch your main script file even without AHK already running. (And if you have an AHK-defined hotkey to quit the script, you can reuse the same hotkey for launching the script, so the overall effect of the hotkey is to toggle the running/not-running status of the script itself)

Code: Select all

CreateShortcutToScript("q")
CreateShortcutToScript(ShortcutKey){
	ShortcutPath := A_StartMenuCommon "\" A_ScriptName ".lnk"
	if !FileExist(ShortcutPath)
		FileCreateShortcut(A_AhkPath, ShortcutPath, A_WorkingDir, '"' . A_ScriptFullPath '"',,,ShortcutKey,,)
}

^!q::ExitApp()

Limitations: FileCreateShortcut currently can only assign ctrl+alt shortcuts. If you want to assign ctrl+alt+shift+... shortcuts (as seen in the screenshot above), you need to manually configure it in the Properties window.