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AutoHotKey - Take Control of Your Keyboard
The
other night as I was trying to fall asleep, I made a mental note to
search for a utility that I would like to have that I figured probably
didn't yet exist, or at least not in a way that would be useful to me.
I wanted to be able to remap hotkey assignments in a way that is
contextually valid depending on the application I'm in. In other words,
I'd like to be able to create consistent hotkeys regardless of the
program I'm in, so that pressing a given keystroke always performs a
similar action. In my case, I have been using an email client for awhile (NEOPro) that has some pretty well thought out and easy to use hotkeys, like pressing space marks a message as read, shift-space marks it unread, the backspace key will file the message, etc. I wanted to be able to have the same keystrokes perform the same actions in Outlook.
It turns out that the application I was looking for already exists, and even better, it's free! And the kicker is that it's far more powerful than just remapping keys, though it does that job extremely well. It's called AutoHotKey. Now I must warn you that this is a bit of a geeky tool in that there is no GUI for setting up hotkeys; you have to learn AutoHotKey's scripting language. Thankfully, it's quite simple, and doing a few quick searches for example code will almost always help you find what you're looking for. I have to say, I'm in love with this program.
Comments
3
Subscribe to commentsl0neAug 22nd 2005 12:29PM
Mac users: see the Keyboard & Mouse pane in System Preferences for equivalent functionality.
AngelAug 22nd 2005 1:00PM
If you like AutoHotKey, you will like even more AutoIt v3 (www.autoitscript.com), which is the free tool in which AutoHotKey was originally based. The newest version is much easier to use and by far more powerful than AutoHotKey. The AutoIt syntax is like BASIC, it lets you control any program and it let's you create very easily your own GUIs.
For some reason AutoHotKey is getting a lot of press latelly, but they seem to ignore that AutoHotKey copied the AutoIt GPLd code, give very little credit to the AutoIt authors and then it did not keep up with the new features that have been added to AutoIT it the past year.
I've tried both, and AutoIT v.3 is so much better. Do yourself a favor and check their web page (www.autoitscript.com). Their forums are extremelly helpful.
Cheers,
Angel
AdoraAug 22nd 2005 5:23PM
I submitted autohotkey to dsq's tip line last week (I don't know if this was before or after it was featured on lifehacker, but I laughed when I saw it on there a couple of days ago). If there's something better than autohotkey, I'm definitely excited to try it out. I installed AutoIt, but as is common with more powerful applications, I've been working for about 45 minutes now and still don't have a hotkey. The help file doesn't mention too much about it, and even the example scripts listed on the forum are throwing errors.
Shame on AutoHotKey for their GPL squirlyness, but for someone who only wants custom system-wide hotkeys, I still say it's a better choice.
:: Lisa
:: adora [at] techslut [.] net